The forger’s laughing fit immediately ceased. “Mr Lerner, what you ask is absolutely unrealistic,” he said quickly. “Impossible. You will find this no matter who you talk to. Unless you have the misfortune of hooking up with some small-time fraud who does the shoddiest work that will have the American or the British authorities on your ass in seconds. I am a craftsman, Mr. Lerner. The work I do is absolutely top-notch, of the highest quality.” With another feral smile, he added: “Better, I may say, than the real thing.”
Baumann sat down again. “Then how much time do you require?”
“It depends upon what you want exactly. The British documents are no problem whatsoever. The American ones, on the other hand-well, this can be a major challenge.”
“So I understand.”
“In April of 1993,” Bones explained, “the U.S. government began issuing new passports marked with what is called a kinegram, which looks like a hologram, if you know what that is.”
Baumann nodded impatiently, closing his eyes.
“It’s part of the laminate on the identity page. When you hold it up to the light, it changes between two different images. We still have not devised a satisfactory method to copy that, although in a short time I have no doubt we will. Fortunately, the older-style American passports are still valid and in use. Those are much easier to reproduce. Though still quite difficult. To forge a new passport requires access to the paper, or better still, to the actual passport books that the government uses. It also requires the proper equipment, which is strictly controlled, difficult to obtain, and extremely expensive-”
“And time-consuming, I imagine.”
“Very much so. Because of your time constraints, forgery is out. The only possibility is to acquire a valid passport and alter it.”
“I’m familiar with how it’s done,” Baumann said, smiling thinly. He produced Sumner Robinson’s passport, opened it to the identity page, and showed it to the forger, covering the name with his thumb.
“You hired an amateur,” the forger said disapprovingly.
Baumann nodded.
“This was crudely done.” He shook his head. “If you used this and were not caught-well, you were lucky. You must not use this again.”
Baumann took the insult to his craftsmanship in stride. “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “I have no doubt you will do a superior job. But how can you ensure that a stolen passport will not be reported as missing or stolen, and placed on the look-out list on the computers at all American ports of entry? The only way I can think of is to take a passport that belongs to someone who never uses it, and therefore wouldn’t notice its absence.”
“Exactly, Mr. Lerner. The network at my disposal has the names and addresses of Americans living abroad, in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and other places. Americans who have passports but rarely if ever travel.”
“Good,” Baumann said.
The two men negotiated a price-a stiff one, as it turned out, because of the number of personnel, including a small ring of petty break-and-enter specialists, who’d require a cut.
As he was about to leave, Baumann added, as if in afterthought: “Oh, and while your people are at it, have them get me an assortment of credit cards. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and whatnot.”
“Credit cards?” Van den Vondel replied dubiously. “Passports that are seldom used are one thing. But credit cards-they’re almost always noticed missing. They’d be canceled immediately.”
“Quite right,” Baumann said. “But that makes no difference to me.” He extended his hand; the forger gave a moist, oily squeeze. “Until tomorrow night, then.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Once Baumann concluded his business with the forger, he took a taxi to Schiphol Airport, rented a Mercedes at an all-night car-rental agency, and set out toward the Belgian border. He was bone-tired and in need of a good night’s sleep, but there was, to be fair, a certain logic to his middle-of-the-night journey. The distance between Amsterdam and Liège, Belgium, is 120 miles, a drive of only a few hours. In the hours after midnight, the roads were empty and the drive went quickly. Motoring was far less time-consuming than flying to Brussels, then driving to Liège. And Baumann wanted to arrive in the early morning.
There was a black-market armaments dealer who for years had lived and conducted his trade in a village just south of Liège, Baumann had ascertained after a few calls to underground armaments shippers at the Port of Antwerp. Baumann’s sources indicated that this dealer, a man named Charreyron, could do the job Baumann needed done.
Historically, Belgium has always been Europe’s most notorious, most active arms manufacturer and dealer. It exports 90 percent of the weapons it produces. And the capital of the Belgian arms industry since the Middle Ages has been Liège, at the junction of the Meuse and the Ourthe rivers: the heart of the Belgian steel industry and Europe’s third-largest inland port.
In 1889, the Belgian government decided its army needed a reliable single source for the Mauser Model 1888 military rifle, and founded at Liège the Fabrique Nationale d’Armes de Guerre. Ten years later, Fabrique Nationale, or FN, began making Browning pistols, which it makes to this day, along with machine guns and rifles. (It was FN rifles that Fidel Castro first used upon seizing power in Cuba.) As a result of this industry, a number of small-arms dealers have grown up around Liège in the last half-century, some of them dealing quite profitably outside the law.
By four o’clock in the morning Baumann had reached Liège. The sky was pitch-black; dawn was still a few hours away. He was exhausted, badly in need of a few hours’ rest, and he considered what to do next.
He could drive into the Place Saint-Lambert and fortify himself with a cup of strong black coffee, perhaps read a few newspapers. Or park somewhere quiet and doze until he was awakened by first light.
But he decided not to trouble with driving into the city, and instead continued on southwest. As he drove through the darkness, he found himself growing increasingly contemplative. The gloomy landscape reminded him of the western Transvaal of his childhood.
The small town in which Baumann had been born was settled in the early nineteenth century by Voortrekkers. Very quickly it became a plak-kie-dorp, a shantytown. When Baumann was a child, the town was made up of Dutch farmhouses and rondavels with thatched roofs. His parents’ farmhouse was situated hard by the Magaliesberg Mountains, forty kilometers outside Pretoria, surrounded by broodboom and bread trees.
He taught himself to hunt in the bushveld nearby, which teemed with wildebeest and springbok, the perfect game. For all of his childhood, and even into his adolescence, he kept to himself, preferring solitude to the company of other children, who bored him. When he wasn’t hunting or hiking or collecting rock and plant specimens in the bushveld, he was reading. He had no brothers or sisters: in the years after his birth, his Boer parents tried repeatedly to conceive, but miscarriage followed miscarriage until it became clear his mother was unable to bear another child.
His father, a tobacco farmer who’d sold his farm to the Magaliesberg Tobacco Corporation, the cooperative that owned most of the tobacco farms in the region, was a gloomy, silent man who died of a heart attack when Baumann was six. Baumann’s memories of his father were few. His mother supported the two of them by taking in sewing.
She worried constantly about her only son, whom she didn’t understand. He was unlike the other children in town, unlike the sons of her neighbors and few friends. She was concerned he had been damaged by the untimely death of his father, had turned inward from the lack of brothers or sisters, had been rendered permanently sullen by his solitary existence. And she despaired of a solution.