WATCHERS by Dean R. Koontz

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

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