Watchers (46 page)

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 G. 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.”

“We’re into TRW, the credit-reporting agency,” one of the twin Spielberg look-alikes said with obvious delight.

Nora saw data flickering across the green screens, but none of it had any meaning for her.

“They’re creating solid credit histories for our new identities,” Travis told her. “By the time we do settle down somewhere and put in a change of address with the DMV and TRW, our mailbox will be flooded with offers for credit cards—Visa, Mastercard, probably even American Express and Carte Blanche.”

“Nora Jean Aimes,” she said numbly, trying to grasp how quickly and thoroughly her new life was being built.

Because they could locate no infant who had died in the year of Travis’s birth with his first name, he had to settle for being Samuel Spencer Hyatt, who had been born that January and had perished that March in Portland, Oregon. The death would be expunged from the public record, and Travis’s new identity would stand up to fairly intense scrutiny.

Strictly for fun (they said), the bearded young operators created a military record for Travis, crediting him six years in the Marines and awarding him a Purple Heart plus a couple of citations for bravery during a peacekeeping-mission-turned-violent in the Middle East. To their delight, he asked if they could also create a valid real-estate broker’s license under his new name, and within twenty-five minutes they cracked into the right data banks and did the job.

“Cake and pie,” one of the young men said.

“Cake and pie,” the other echoed.

Nora frowned, not understanding.

“Piece of cake,” one of them explained.

“Easy as pie,” the other said.

“Cake and pie,” Nora said, nodding.

The blonde with copper-penny eyes returned, carrying driver’s licenses imprinted with Travis’s and Nora’s pictures. “You’re both quite photogenic,” she said.

Two hours and twenty minutes after meeting Van Dyne, they left Hot Tips with two manila envelopes containing a variety of documents supporting their new identities. Out on the street, Nora felt a little dizzy and held on to Travis’s arm all the way back to the car.

Fog had rolled through the city while they had been in Hot Tips. The blinking lights and flashing-rippling neon of the Tenderloin were softened yet curiously magnified by the mist, so it seemed as if every cubic centimeter of night air was awash with strange lights, with an aurora borealis brought down to ground level. Those sleazy streets had a certain mystery and cheap allure after dark, in the fog, but not if you’d seen them in daylight first and remembered what you had seen.

In the Mercedes, Einstein was waiting patiently.

“Couldn’t arrange to have you turned into a poodle, after all,” Nora told him as she buckled her seat belt. “But we sure did ourselves up right. Einstein, say hello to Sam Hyatt and Nora Aimes.”

The retriever put his head over the front seat, looked at her, looked at Travis, and snorted once as if to say they could not fool him, that
he
knew who they were.

To Travis, Nora said, “Your antiterrorist training . . . is that where you learned about places like Hot Tips, people like Van Dyne? Is that where terrorists get new ID once they slip into the country?”

“Yeah, some go to people like Van Dyne, though not usually. The Soviets supply papers for most terrorists. Van Dyne services mostly ordinary illegal immigrants, though not the poor ones, and criminal types looking to dodge arrest warrants.”

As he started the car, she said, “But if you could find Van Dyne, maybe the people looking for us can find him.”

“Maybe. It’ll take them a while, but maybe they can.”

“Then they’ll find out all about our new identities.”

“No,” Travis said. He turned on the defroster and the windshield wipers to clear the condensation off the outside of the glass. “Van Dyne wouldn’t keep records. He doesn’t want to be caught with proof of what he does. If the authorities ever tumble to him and go in there with search warrants, they won’t find anything in Van Dyne’s computers except the accounting and purchasing records for Hot Tips.”

As they drove through the city, heading for the Golden Gate Bridge, Nora stared in fascination at the people in the streets and in other cars, not just in the Tenderloin but in every neighborhood through which they passed. She wondered how many of them were living under the names and identities with which they had been born and how many were changelings like her and Travis.

“In less than three hours, we’ve been totally remade,” she said.

“Some world we live in, huh? More than anything else, that’s what high technology means—maximum fluidity. The whole world is becoming ever more fluid, malleable. Most financial transactions are now handled with electronic money that flashes from New York to L.A.—or around the world—in seconds. Money crosses borders in a blink; it no longer has to be smuggled out past the guards. Most records are kept in the form of electrical charges that only computers read. So everything’s fluid. Identities are fluid. The past is fluid.”

Nora said, “Even the genetic structure of a species is fluid these days.”

Einstein woofed agreement.

Nora said, “Scary, isn’t it?”

“A little,” Travis said as they approached the light-bedecked southern entrance to the fog-mantled Golden Gate Bridge, which was all but invisible in the mist. “But maximum fluidity is basically a good thing. Social and financial fluidity guarantee freedom. I believe—and I hope—that we’re heading toward an age when the role of governments will inevitably dwindle, when there’ll be no way to regulate and control people as thoroughly as was possible in the past. Totalitarian governments won’t be able to stay in power.”

“How so?”

“Well, how can a dictatorship control its citizens in a high-tech society of maximum fluidity? The only way is to refuse to allow high tech to intrude, seal the borders, and live entirely in an earlier age. But that’d be national suicide for any country that tried it. They couldn’t compete. In a few decades, they’d be modern aborigines, primitive by the standards of the civilized high-tech world. Right now, for instance, the Soviets try to restrict computers to their defense industry, which can’t last. They’ll have to computerize their entire economy and teach their people to use computers—and
then
how can they keep the screws tight when their citizens have been given the means to manipulate the system and foil its controls on them?”

At the entrance to the bridge, no northbound toll was collected. They drove onto the span, where the speed limit had been drastically reduced because of the weather.

Looking up at the ghostly skeleton of the bridge, which glistened with condensation and vanished in the fog, Nora said, “You seem to think the world will be paradise in a decade or two.”

“Not paradise,” he said. “Easier, richer, safer, happier. But not a paradise. After all, there will still be all the problems of the human heart and all the potential sicknesses of the human mind. And the new world’s bound to bring us some new dangers as well as blessings.”

“Like the thing that killed your landlord,” she said.

“Yes.”

In the back seat, Einstein growled.

That Thursday afternoon, August 26, Vince Nasco drove to Johnny The Wire Santini’s place in San Clemente to pick up the past week’s report, which was when he learned of the murder of Ted Hockney in Santa Barbara the previous evening. The condition of the corpse, especially the missing eyes, linked it to The Outsider. Johnny had also ascertained that the NSA had quietly assumed jurisdiction in the case, which convinced Vince it was related to the Banodyne fugitives.