Alice reached Geneva by midnight. To get travel documents, she had to pay a visit to Russ Augenblick, the forger, who did a lot of his business out of a nightclub on the rue de la Rotisserie, L’Alhambar, known for jazz.
She parked the Mercedes on a sleepy residential side street three blocks away, then walked. Her route, with the usual strategic left turns, added four blocks.
Tonight L’Alhambar featured a brass quartet with a predilection for volume. Among its throng of early-twentysomethings, she spotted the slight, fair-haired forger, in a Red Sox T-shirt. He stood by the curlicue bar, part of a small crowd vying to order drinks.
“I need one too,” Alice said, sidling up to him. “Big-time.”
At twenty-five, Russ Augenblick could pass for a choirboy, his wispy attempts at a mustache and beard, paradoxically, highlighting his youthfulness. He regarded Alice as if she were insane. “Dude, you’re hotter than Satan.”
“Oh, you like my new jacket?” Frank’s gray overcoat gave her the form of a traffic cone. “Thanks.”
“I mean, showing up here. This place has more cameras than a camera store. What kind of super-crazy-desperate trouble are you in?”
“The usual kind. I need your ‘full suite,’ tout de suite.”
He looked down at his sneakers. “I can’t. Not now. Sorry, man.”
“By all means, go ahead and have your beer. My treat, in fact-if the bartender can break a hundred-euro bill …”
“I can’t take you to the workshop while you’re listed as shoot-on-sight. Not even you would take that risk.”
“Yes you can, Stew.”
Despite himself, he blanched. Russ Augenblick was an alias.
“I know about California,” she continued. “But there’s no reason to tell tales out of school, is there?”
While at the NSA, Alice had learned the truth about “Russ,” but she allowed him to continue operating in case he might be of use at some point. Like now. She was prepared to tell what she knew of Stewart Fleishman’s freshman year at Berkeley, where making the scene at off-campus bars was mandatory, the drinking age was twenty-one, and his Massachusetts driver’s license showed his true age. The fake California license he’d bought proved useless because the bouncers ran licenses through magnetic strip scanners-a flashing red light resulted in a long and expensive night with Berkeley’s finest. Fleishman chose to replicate a Delaware license because of its simplicity and relative obscurity. A quick trip to San Francisco netted him a sheet of the same PVC the Delaware Department of Motor Vehicles used, plus a magnetic strip that he programmed so the scanners informed the bouncers that this fair-haired young man was a twenty-one-year-old from Wilmington. His classmates wanted Delaware driver’s licenses of their own. He went into business, and business had boomed, enough that a college degree in economics was redundant. Because it was illegal in the United States to possess, produce, or distribute falsified government documents, he set up shop in Thailand, where counterfeiting was something of a national pastime. He now sold $500,000 worth of fake U.S. driver’s licenses over the Internet per year. Passports, much easier to forge, netted him ten times as much money.
If Alice were to spend three minutes on the Homeland Security tips site now, Stewart Fleishman aka Russ Augenblick would face extradition, at the least.
“I need you to hack into the customs database,” she told him. “I want you to make me a passport with the information of an American, Canadian, or Brit actually traveling in Switzerland right now.” With such a passport she could waltz out of the country.
He grumbled. “Buy me a mescal shot too and I’ll try. A double.”
After their drinks, she followed him through the back exit and down a windy but otherwise quiet side street to his vintage VW love bus.
Demonstrating surprising courtliness, the forger trudged through slush to open the front passenger door for her. The entire van, apparently restored without regard to cost, smelled new.
With a hint of fresh male perspiration.
Alice knew without looking, but turned anyway. Four men in black jumpsuits and matching body armor sat in the back of the van, each gripping a Sig, the silenced barrels pointed at her.
By way of greeting, the man closest to her said, “Dienst fur Analyse und Pravention,” German for “Service for Analysis and Prevention,” the Swiss domestic intelligence agency, which, evidently, had a working relationship with a certain forger.