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

rendered that impractical. A blanket digital sweep would be on his name; anywhere he went with his current identification would trigger alarms, so he needed a new identity. He could have used James Delacourt’s name, but he wanted to save that for later. He had already sent Delacourt’s vitals to a colleague in Moscow. That colleague would do the rest and send the results back to the States when Ilya asked for it.
    He took a cab to a Starbucks in downtown Orlando, amid the cookie-cutter office towers and generic parks, bought a coffee, and sat near a young man with a goatee, who was working on his laptop. Ilya waited ten minutes, then asked the young man if he would watch Ilya’s own laptop while he went to the bathroom. The young man agreed, and Ilya took his time in the men’s room. He wanted the young man with the goatee to see how much Ilya trusted him; how willing Ilya was to put a valuable possession in this young man’s hands. Compassionate reciprocity was a key weapon in the social engineer’s tool kit.Ilya sat down five minutes later and thanked the young man, then opened the computer and surfed the Web for a while.
    Sure enough, ten minutes later, the young man with the goatee got up and asked Ilya if he’d return the favor. Ilya said sure and even offered to keep the young man’s backpack under his chair for safekeeping. The young man hurried off to the bathroom. Ilya made sure no one was watching, then rifled through the man’s backpack. He found a Florida driver’s license, a Bank of America debit card, a loyalty card from Winn-Dixie, a community college ID, and an overdue utility bill. From those, he had everything he needed: a name, date of birth, address, college ID number, and even the beginnings of a bank account number. He didn’t steal any of those cards—that would alert the young man and defeat Ilya’s purpose. Instead, he took cell phone pictures of each piece of ID, then put everything back in the wallet exactly as he had found it.
    When the young man returned—his name was Robert Jacob Mullins—he thanked Ilya, retrieved his backpack, and went back to working on his laptop. Ilya sent all of Mullins’s information to a storage folder on the darknet. His associate in Moscow would download the information from the folder, then overnight the finished product to an agreed-upon address in Atlanta. Ilya packed up and left without saying another word.
    Plenty of IDs were to be had on the black market, but Ilya didn’t trust them. Every city in the United States had backroom counterfeiters ready to print out driver’s licenses and passports by the dozen, with varying degrees of quality, for the right amount of money, and Ilya knew that in the next ten days he might need to avail himself of the services of one of those back-alley print shops. But for the time being, he preferred to capture the necessary information himself, and to have known craftsmen transform that information into high-quality, usable pieces of identification.
    He had $700 cash left in his wallet, which was plenty for the next twenty-four hours. He paid $20 for a cab that took him to Valencia College, a sprawling campus west of downtown that looked more like a business park than a school; then he sauntered into the student union, logged on to the online bulletin board, and hunted for anyone needing passengers to Atlanta.
    Within five minutes he’d found a pair of women leaving in half an hour. Eliza and Sarah agreed to carry him if he paid for half of the gas, probablyaround twenty bucks, and if they retained veto power over the music choices. No rap, no Phish. He agreed instantly. For the first part of the trip north, Eliza and Sarah chatted happily in the front of the car, and Ilya sat mutely in back. By the Florida-Georgia border, however, Ilya sensed that his silence was making the women nervous—Eliza kept flashing him looks in the rearview mirror—so he started a conversation about college football, then fast food,