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