“Confidence is good. But in Delta Force, one of the first things you learn is that being overly confident can get you killed.”
The door opened, and the hulk returned with a round-faced man in a gray suit, blue shirt, and black tie.
“Van Dyne,” the newcomer said, but he did not offer to shake hands. He went around the desk and sat in a spring-backed chair. He had thinning blond hair and baby-smooth cheeks. He looked like a stockbroker in a television commerciaclass="underline" efficient, smart, as well-meaning as he was well-groomed. “I wanted to talk to you because I want to know who’s spreading these falsehoods about me.”
Travis said, “We need new ID-driver’s licenses, social security cards, the whole works. First-rate, with full backup, not junk.”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Van Dyne said. He raised his eyebrows quizzically. “Where on earth did you get the idea that I’m in that sort of business? I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed.”
“We need first-rate paper with full backup,” Travis repeated.
Van Dyne stared at him, at Nora. “Let me see your wallet. And your purse, miss.”
Putting his wallet on the desk, Travis told Nora, “It’s okay.”
Reluctantly, she put her purse beside the wallet.
“Please stand and let Caesar search you,” Van Dyne said.
Travis stood and motioned for Nora to get up as well.
Caesar, the cement-faced hulk, searched Travis with embarrassing thoroughness, found the .357 Magnum, put it on the desk. He was even more thorough with Nora, unbuttoning her blouse and boldly feeling the cups of her bra for a miniature microphone, battery, and recorder. She blushed and would not have permitted these intimacies if Travis had not explained to her what Caesar was looking for, Besides, Caesar remained expressionless throughout, as if he were a machine without the potential for erotic response.
When Caesar was finished with them, they sat down while Van Dyne went through Travis’s wallet and then through Nora’s purse. She was afraid he was going to take their money without giving them anything in return, but he appeared to be interested in only their ID and the butcher’s knife that Nora Still carried.
To Travis, Van Dyne said, “Okay. If you were a cop, you wouldn’t be allowed to carry a Magnum”-he swung out the cylinder and looked at the ammunition-loaded with magnums. The ACLU would have your ass.” He smiled at Nora. “No policewoman carries a butcher’s knife.”
Suddenly she understood what Travis meant when he’d said he was carrying the revolver not for protection but for its value as ID.
Van Dyne and Travis haggled a bit, finally settling on sixty-five hundred as the price for two sets of ID with “full backup.”
Their belongings, including the butcher’s knife and revolver, were returned to them.
From the gray office, they followed Van Dyne into the narrow hall, where he dismissed Caesar, then to a set of dimly lit concrete stairs leading to a basement beneath Hot Tips, where the rock music was further filtered by the intervening concrete floor.
Nora was not sure what she expected to find in the basement: maybe men who all looked like Edward 0. Robinson and wore green eye shades on elastic bands and labored over antique printing presses, producing not just false identification papers but stacks of phony currency. What she found, instead, surprised her.
The steps ended in a stone-walled storage room about forty by thirty feet. Bar supplies were stacked to shoulder height. They walked along a narrow aisle formed by cartons of whiskey, beer, and cocktail napkins, to a steel fire door in the rear wall. Van Dyne pushed a button in the door frame, and a closed-circuit security camera made a purring sound as it panned them.
The door was opened from inside, and they went through into a smaller room with subdued lighting, where two young bearded guys were working at two of seven computers lined up on work tables along one wall. The first guy was wearing soft Rockport shoes, safari pants, a web belt, and a cotton safari shirt. The other wore Reeboks, jeans, and a sweatshirt that featured the Three Stooges. They looked almost like twins, and both resembled young versions of Steven Spielberg. They were so intensely involved with their computer work that they did not look up at Nora and Travis and Van Dyne, but they were having fun, too, talking exuberantly to themselves, to their machines, and to each other in high-tech language that made no sense whatsoever to Nora.
A woman in her early twenties was also at work in the room. She had short blond hair and oddly beautiful eyes the color of pennies. While Van Dyne spoke with the two guys at the computers, the woman took Travis and Nora to the far end of the room, put them in front of a white screen, and photographed them for the phony driver’s licenses.
When the blonde disappeared into a darkroom to develop the film, Travis and Nora rejoined Van Dyne at the computers, where the young men were working happily. Nora watched them accessing the supposedly secure computers of the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security Administration, as well as those of other federal, state, and local government agencies.
“When I told Mr. Van Dyne that I wanted ID with ‘full backup,’ “Travis explained, “I meant the driver’s licenses must be able to stand up to inspection if we’re ever stopped by a highway patrolman who runs a check on them. The licenses we’re getting are indistinguishable from the real thing. These guys are inserting our new names into the DMV’s files, actually creating computer records of these licenses in the state’s data banks.”
Van Dyne said, “The addresses are phony, of course. But when you settle down somewhere, under your new names, you just apply to the DMV for a change of address like the law requires, and then you’ll be perfectly legit. We’re setting these up to expire in about a year, at which time you’ll go into a DMV office, take the usual test, and get brand-new licenses because your new names are in their files.”
“What’re our new names?” Nora wondered.
“You see,” Van Dyne said, speaking with the quiet assurance and patience of a stockbroker explaining the market to a new investor, “we have to start with birth certificates. We keep computer files of infant deaths all over the western United States, going back at least fifty years. We’ve already searched those lists for the years each of you was born, trying to find babies who died with your hair and eye colors-and with your first names, too, just because it’s easier for you not to have to change both first and last. We found a little girl, Nora Jean Aimes, born October twelfth of the year you were born and who died one month later, right here in San Francisco. We have a laser printer with virtually an infinite choice of type styles and sizes, with which we’ve already produced a facsimile of the kind of birth certificate that was in use in San Francisco at that time, and it bears Nora Jean’s name, vital statistics. We’ll make two Xeroxes of it, and you’ll receive both. Next, we tapped into the Social Security files and appropriated a number for Nora Jean Aimes, who never was given one, and we also created a history of Social Security tax payments.” He smiled. “You’ve already paid in enough quarters to qualify you for a pension when you retire. Likewise, the IRS now has computer records that show you’ve worked as a waitress in half a dozen cities and that you’ve faithfully paid your taxes every year.”
Travis said, “With a birth certificate and legitimate Social Security number, they were then able to get a driver’s license that would have real ID behind it.”
“So I’m Nora Jean Aimes? But if her birth certificate’s on record, so is her death certificate. If someone wanted to check-”
Van Dyne shook his head. “In those days, both birth and death certificates were strictly paper documents, no computer files. And because it squanders more money that it spends wisely, the government has never had the funds to transfer records of the precomputer era into electronic data banks. So if someone gets suspicious about you, they can’t just search out the death records On computer and learn the truth in two minutes flat. They’d have to go to the courthouse, dig back through the coroner's files for that year, and find Nora Jean’s death certificate. But that won’t happen because part of our service involves having Nora Jean’s certificate removed from public records and destroyed now that you’ve bought her identity.”