Leaving the courtroom at three-thirty Friday afternoon, I felt sure that we were going to lose. Before the reporters pressed in on me, I managed to say hi to Sorrel and tell her I’d see her at Carol’s in an hour.
After I shook off the press, I drove to the Wells Fargo in downtown San Jose and found a parking space on the street. My bank balance was indeed thirteen thousand dollars plus. Thank you, West West! Though the teller didn’t like it, I got the thirteen thousand in cash; it made a fat envelope of 130 hundred-dollar bills. I’d decided to give a third of it to Carol for the children, so I asked for another envelope and counted 44 hundreds into that one. I felt grim and sad. I was leaving my country and my poor little family-maybe for good.
I calmed down a little on the walk over to Pho Train. I ordered the same pho soup again. This time I used the tip of my chopstick to add some red-pepper paste to the broth. With the pepper and the spicy green leaves, the soup was truly delicious. I slurped down as much as I could before Vinh appeared, fuming cigarette in hand.
“You ready?” he asked. “We can walk from here. But give me the thousand first.”
“Okay.” I pulled my main envelope of hundreds out of my pants pocket and counted out ten bills for Vinh under the table. His bony hand reached across to take them, and then he passed me a flat plastic package under the table: my four Y9707 chips. I stuck the package unopened in my other pants pocket.
We walked two blocks to a neighborhood of rundown two-story apartment buildings made of crumbling pink stucco over plywood. The buildings had flat roofs, prefab aluminum windows, and concrete stairwells. All the children playing in the street were Vietnamese-a regular Our Gang of loud little girls, T-shirted toddlers, and watchful boys. Everyone seemed to recognize the pockmarked, chain-smoking Vinh Vo. Vinh knocked at a street-level apartment door and a thin young woman holding a screwdriver let us in.
It was a single-room efficiency apartment with another young woman, fat, sitting down. The windows were hermetically closed off with filthy curtains and Venetian blinds. The room was lit by computer monitors and lamps; the ventilation came through an antique wall unit air conditioner. There was a great hoard of computer equipment along the walls, and there were loads of books and computer manuals. The chairs had vinyl cushions.
“Here’s your customer, girls,” said Vinh. He smiled thinly at me. “This is Bety Byte and Vanna. They’re computer science students at San Jose State. They’re the best cryps in our Vietnamese community.”
Heavyset Bety Byte wore a cyberspace headset pushed up onto the top of her head like sunglasses. She had thick lips, yellow, skin, and greasy, permed, distressed hair. Surely she had no inkling that I’d seen her tuxedo in cyberspace-and I wasn’t about to tell her. Pale, slim Vanna wore tight black slacks and a round-collared pink blouse buttoned up to the top. Her glossy hair was cut in a tidy bob. Bety Byte and Vanna didn’t look much like their tuxedos.
“I recognize this dude from TV,” said Bety Byte, pointing a control-gloved hand at me. The tips of the control gloves were cut off and I could see her fingernails. She wore chipped black nail polish. “You’re Jerzy Rugby!” She spoke with a perfect riot-grrl mall-rat accent.
“No,” I said emphatically. “I am not. I’m not anyone until you tell me my new name.”
“He’s incognito,” laughed Vanna. “I think he’s scared.”
“Do you know how passport authentication works?” asked Bety Byte.
“Sort of. As well as forging me a passport, you have to put a valid bar code on it. The government uses a secret algorithm to generate long authentication numbers that go into the bar code.”
“That’s right,” said Vanna. She was still holding her screwdriver. “We haven’t figured out how to generate our own authentication numbers, but we do have a way into the current State Department passport files. What we’ll do is to find the name of someone who has a passport and who resembles you. Then we’ll use his passport’s authentication number on our forgery.” She smiled and gave a quick nod for emphasis.
“Crypping the State Department can’t be very easy,” I said politely.
“Well, we have this killer can opener program that we got from a phreak friend of ours,” said Bety from her chair. “ Ex friend, that is.” I had the feeling she was talking about Riscky Pharbeque. From what I’d heard Bety and Vanna say in cyberspace, they were mad at Riscky for spray-painting “Hex DEF6” on the wall of the Cryp Club library. But I had nothing to gain by chatting about this topic.
“Do you have to take my picture first or what?” I asked.
“First you have to pay us,” said Bety.
“Here’s two hundred dollars,” said Vinh, stepping forward and holding out two of the bills I’d given him.
“I told you seven hundred,” cried Bety.
“Three hundred dollars is my final offer,” said Vinh Vo and added another bill to the little fan he held out toward Bety.
“We won’t do it for less than four hundred,” said Bety. She unwrapped a stick of pharmaceutical green bubble gum and popped it in her mouth. “Bye, Vinh. Bye, Jerzy. Show ‘em out, Vanna.”
Vanna laughed in that meaningless Asian way, but she didn’t immediately do anything-she just stood there holding her screwdriver. I fumbled in my pocket to find one more bill. Vinh Vo watched me with unblinking, predatory interest. I passed him the bill and he tendered the four hundred dollars to Bety. She tucked the money into her pants pocket and gave Vanna a nod.
“Okay, Jerzy,” said Vanna. “Lets narrow in on a name.” She laid down her screwdriver and put on control gloves and a headset.
“How tall are you?” she asked. “How much do you weigh? Place of birth? Date of birth? Scars?” She input my responses by making flowing hand gestures in midair; she was dancing her way up the search tree of the sample space. “Here’s twenty good ones,” said Vanna presently and snapped her fingers.
A list of names appeared in a box on the computer screen next to me. I chose a forty-two-year-old divorced electrical engineer named Sandy Schrandt.
Bety Byte picked up a small video camera and slid her headset down over her eyes. She began walking rapidly around the cluttered room while pointing the camera at me.
“In case you’re wondering, I’m not going to bump into anything,” said Bety, chomping on her green gum. “I’m seeing through this videocam. I’m using a pass-through.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Just like stunglasses.” It was a hacker point of pride to be down with the latest street tech.
Bety kept on shooting video of me, occasionally flicking a finger to capture a still image. The images accumulated in a grid on the computer screen. Before long, Bety had filled the grid with pictures of me: the central pictures were full-on, or nearly so, and the pictures at the edge of the grid were shot from sharper and sharper angles. It was a discontinuous Mercator projection of my head.
Bety sat down and gestured in the air for a minute and then the color laser printer coughed and spit out the eleven double pages of my new passport, each page with Sandy Schrandt’s passport bar code on the edge. On the top page there was a shiny reflection hologram that showed a three-dimensional image of my head. Bety and Vanna’s software had fused the grid images of me into a single holographic image that turned as you tilted it from side to side.
“Great!” I exclaimed.
Vanna changed the paper tray and the copier coughed once more to produce a thick passport cover. She and Bety Byte took off their headsets and studied the pages for a minute, and then they used hot glue and a small sewing machine to bind the passport up.