He was still grinning three weeks ago, when Avery went to see him again. Benny Lu lived in a small development house out on Sands Spit, a half-hour drive from the city. Avery told him what he needed. A fake credit card that would enable him to rent a car…
He told Benny he’d be renting a car instead of a boat because over the years he had learned that you shouldn’t trust anyone but your mother, and maybe not even her…
…and a fake driver’s license to back up the name on the phony credit card.
“Piece of cake,” Benny Lu said, grinning.
His basement looked like a computer nerd’s hangout. Benny himself looked a little like Fu Manchu in the silk robe he was wearing, which he told Avery his sister who still lived in Hong Kong had sent him for Christmas.
“She says it’s no different under the Chinese,” he assured Avery, who didn’t give a rat’s ass about Hong Kongor the Britishor the Chinese. All he cared about was getting the stuff he needed. It was raining outside the basement windows. This was now the end of April. The kidnapping scheme had already been underway for almost two months by then.
When Benny was skimming credit cards for the Hong Kong gang, he was paid a thousand Hong Kong dollars for every name he delivered, which at the time was the equivalent of about a hundred and fifty U.S. bucks. He would skim three or four cards every day except on his day off, which was Wednesday. This averaged out to something like a thousand bucks a week, not enough to buy his own restaurant but plenty of extra spending money if only the Hong Kong credit card dicks hadn’t busted the gang, and almost busted him in the bargain.
Here in the U.S., Benny paid a hundred bucks for each name skimmed by his people in restaurants and gasoline stations. He got his supply of blank plastic cards from a manufacturer in Germany who mass-produced them and sold them to him (and many other counterfeiters like him) for two hundred bucks a card. Using a thermal dye printer, Benny stamped American Express, Visa, or Master-Card graphics onto the face of a blank card, embossed it with the name and account number of a skimmed card’s true owner, and then embedded the stolen code onto the counterfeit’s pristine magnetic stripe. He sold the clones for two thousand bucks a pop, cheap at twice the price when you considered that whatever you charged on the electronically identical card wouldn’t be discovered until the genuine card’s owner got his bill a month later.
“Sign the name on this sheet of paper a dozen or so times before you sign the back of the card,” Benny told him. “So it’ll have a natural flow to it.”
“Andy Hardy?” Avery said. “That’s the guy’s name?”
“That’s his name, that’s right. That’s the name on the original card.”
“Like in Mickey Rooney?”
“Who’s Mickey Rooney?” Benny asked.
“Don’t they show old movies on television in Hong Kong?”
“Sure, but who’s Mickey Rooney?”
“He was Andy Hardy.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You never heard of Judge Hardy?”
“I try to stay far away from judges,” Benny said.
Avery shrugged, and then signed the name “Andy Hardy” ten times before he signed the back of the card. He was now in possession of a credit card with the name ANDY HARDY embossed on its front in raised letters, and his own “Andy Hardy” signature on the back of it.
“How long will this fly?” he asked Benny.
“Should take you through the end of May at least.”
Which was world enough and time.
Replicating a driver’s license was a simpler and much less expensive matter.
Benny explained that in his line of work a “template” was a layered graphics file that could be computer-manipulated to hide or reveal images and text. In the good old days two or three years ago, when thirty percent of all counterfeit and false identification seized by law enforcement agencies came from the internet, Benny had purchased driver’s-license templates for all fifty states, God bless American enterprise!
Now, while April showers lashed his basement windows, Benny took a digital head-and-shoulders photograph of Avery standing against a blue background. He stored this on one of his computers, together with the scanned “Andy Hardy” signature Avery had used on the credit card. Loading the template for a Connecticut state driver’s license, Benny first called up the photograph, hid it, and then revealed a stored Department-of-Motor-Vehicles signature. When he revealed the photo again, the signature seemed superimposed along its right hand side. Then, in repeated mouse clicks that first hid and then revealed successive layers, Benny replicated the Connecticut state seal, and a shadow image of Avery’s head shot, and the Andy Hardy signature.
Filling in the blank spaces on the template, he typed in the name HARDY, ANDY and an address he pulled from a Connecticut phone book, and below that Avery’s actual date of birth, September 12, 1969. Just beneath that, he typed in a date of issue, which he fabricated as July 26 the previous year, and to the right of that the letter M for Avery’s sex, and the abbreviation BR for the color of his eyes, and 6’1" for his height. He typed in a false identifying license number across the top of the template, and then an expiration date that was on Avery’s birthday, two years after the date of issuance. Lastly, he hid everything he’d already done, and revealed only the bar-code Connecticut had conceived as a security feature. When he revealed the license again, the bar code was running along the bottom of it.
Voilà!
He now had on his computer a document virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. All he had to do was print it and laminate it, and Avery would be in possession of a Connecticut state driver’s license bearing his own photograph alongside Andy Hardy’s name and signature.
The fake license cost Avery three hundred bucks.
For $2,300, he had become Judge Hardy’s son.
Everything else was free.
That was because everything else had been stolen.
Including the girl, too, when he thought about it.
Cal was the experienced thief here, experienced in that he’d never been sent away for Auto Theft, of which there had been plenty, believe me, him having started taking cars on joy rides when he was but a mere sixteen. It was a shame his record had to’ve been marred by that one botched bank holdup, but nobody’s perfect.
The first car they’d used was the black Explorer, which they’d driven to and from the marina, and which they’d already ditched this morning after they’d dropped the girl and Kellie off at the house. Scoped the early morning streets searching for a vehicle parked in a deserted area, found one that looked reliable enough, parked the Explorer behind it while Cal jimmied the door of the prospect car, opened the hood, jump-wired the ignition, and off they went into the wild blue yonder. Nice roomy Pontiac Montana, too.
Avery found it amusing that all these city dwellers owned or leased these big gas-guzzling SUVs with names that sounded all macho woodsy and outdoorsy. These people lived in apartment buildings, and they took the subway to work, and they probably never drove the car further than the nearest movie complex on weekends, but they were all dying to have these big monsters they could drive “off-road.” Off-roadwhere? Avery wondered.
This was the big bad city, man. You didn’t need an Explorer or a Montana or a Durango unless you wore leather chaps and a cowboy hat. Or unless you were transporting merchandise worth a quarter of a million bucks. They would use the Montana when they picked up the ransom money tomorrow, two hundred and fifty Gs in crisp new hundred-dollar bills. By then, Cal would have stolen the third and final car—probably another one with a name like Caravan or Forester or Range Rover—which they would use to drive the girl from the house to wherever they decided to drop her off.