Brendan and Leena had been in the passport business since the seventies, after they'd had to do a runner from the Free State for forging welfare coupons. For the last six or seven years Nigerians buying multiple passports for their multiple mortgages on their multiple buy-to-lets were keeping them generously afloat, but people like me had been their mainstay in the eighties and nineties. I'd first met Brendan during the Struggles, Troubles or the War (what you called it depended on who you were). We used to be sent down to Lewisham to be fitted up with the appropriate documents. I'd used him many times since then at my own expense. He was the best.
I told Lynn to stay out of sight while I rang the doorbell. Brendan himself answered. His face didn't break into a big smile and he didn't throw his arms around me. He just rolled his eyes, tutted and ushered me in. Just how I liked it with the old fucker.
'I have a friend.'
'Would that be a friend with money?'
'Yes.'
'A welcome awaits.'
I waved Lynn over and we stepped across the PVC threshold and into Minging Central. The stench of rotting vegetables and old newspapers reminded me of a run-down corner-shop.
He led us into the sitting room. The red velour curtains were closed. A green three-piece was arranged around a small TV. A raincoat hung over the back of the nearest armchair. A small dark wood table with two chairs stood against one wall. The fireplace was decorated with green thirties tiles, and an equally ancient gas fire had been fitted into the grate. It was doing its asthmatic best to fug up proceedings.
'Glad to see you still don't go for the minimalist look . . .'
He wasn't biting; he never did.
'It would be the usual you're after, would it?'
'My friend here has lost his passport and we need to travel tomorrow.'
He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye. 'And for some reason you choose not to avail your fine upstanding selves of Her Majesty's Passport Office's new premium same-day service?'
'Sometimes the old ways are the best. My friend wants to get away from his wife, her divorce lawyer and the Child Support Agency. He'd prefer not to be traced . . .'
Brendan looked at Lynn and raised an eyebrow.
I grinned. 'Second time round, lucky bastard. Young, beautiful, but, as it turned out, a bit too fond of the Bolivian Marching Powder.'
Coogan laughed. 'The young ones can be just as big a nightmare as the old ones. That's why I stayed with the missus – even though I'm never short of offers.' He cackled to himself.
'Where is the lovely Mrs Coogan? Still making that ginger cake?'
'She does, she does, and no, we haven't any left. She's down at bingo, thank God. She'd be fussing all over you by now and giving you all my biscuits.'
'Could you at least bring yourself to part with two cups of tea?'
He cackled some more as he disappeared into a kitchen that, if the smell coming out of it was anything to go by, was the source of the Ebola outbreak I thought might have brought London to a standstill a few days ago.
The look on Lynn's face told me this was a totally different world for him. A few hours ago he was in his lovely farmhouse, inhaling the sea air and staring out over acres of glorious countryside. Now he was in this minging thirties terrace with this minging old man. He'd probably never seen anything like this in his life, except perhaps when he was delivering coal and food parcels to the family servants at Christmas.
Brendan reappeared with three steaming mugs and half a packet of HobNobs and led us upstairs with a deep sigh. 'Things are a lot more complicated these days, you have to understand. The days of just pressing the printer button are long gone. Welcome to the brave new world of biometrics.'
'That sounds like a posh way of saying your prices have gone up – again.'
He looked pained. 'That it would be, that it would be. Seventeen hundred pounds, in fact. Half now, half tomorrow morning, when you collect.'
'No VAT?'
'Oh, I don't like to bother those nice people at the Excise. They've got quite enough to worry about.'
'What about a discount for old times' sake? My friend has been mauled by lawyers. I told him it was twelve hundred.'
'Fifteen?'
'Done. It'll be in dollars again. Shall we say at 1.90?' I didn't want to spend the whole day rug-trading, but I had to go through the motions. I didn't want to disappoint him.
He turned just short of the landing and looked down at me. At last I got a full smile from him. It always took a while. 'I don't think that would be terribly helpful, do you? There would be complicated calculations and even some change involved. Let's say two dollars a pound. I'll lose some in commission when I exchange, don't forget. A businessman has to watch his margins.'
47
I looked around his workshop. He might have embraced the new technology, but not with open arms. He wasn't working in a stainless-steel hyper-tech bubble, that was for sure. It looked like all his equipment had been salvaged from skips and second-hand shops. Still, if it did the job . . .
'We've brought the usual selection of passport photos, but he hasn't had time to get a new name for himself—'
'Not a problem any more, old son. Do you have yours handy?'
I handed it over.
Brendan waved at Lynn. 'And does your friend have a shot of himself looking like—' he glanced down at a scrappy bit of A4 – 'like Mr Adrian William Letts?'
He took the selection of Woolies' photo-booth pictures from Lynn and gave them the once-over. 'And so he does, thank you. Now, Exhibit A.' He beamed at my passport as if he had just taken hold of yet another new grandchild. 'Supposedly the very pinnacle of travel documentation, brought out after 9/11 to satisfy the US State Department's demands. But in its unseemly haste to dance to their tune, the Passport Agency failed to introduce adequate security measures.'
He might have been the world's oldest man, and the most minging, but he was both an artist and craftsman. Even his language and his facial expressions changed once he got into full flow. 'They say there's a secure microchip in here. But weak encryption, plus lack of basic radio shielding, has produced a chip that can be read by electronic eavesdroppers.'
He grinned. 'Some of my ill-intentioned ilk struggled, but it took me just two weeks to figure out how to clone it. The authorities didn't exactly make it hard for me. They posted the standards for e-passports on several websites – including the International Civil Aviation Organization, the United Nations body that developed the standard.'
He opened the passport. 'Inside, as you see, is a laminated page containing the holder's picture, passport number, name, nationality, sex, signature, date and place of birth, and the document's issue and expiry date. Nothing special so far.
'But at the bottom of the page are two lines of printed numbers and letters, which can be read by a computer when the passport is swiped at the MRZ – the Machine Readable Zone – at the immigration desk.'