Brute Force

45

I did have a weapon tucked away, but it was in another safety blanket, for use if I had to stay in the UK.

Everybody finds their own way to build an alternative ID, and, more especially, hide it. The second one was in northwest London, behind a bakery. It used to be in a safe-deposit box, but the police now had the power to open them up at will.

I wasn't worried about real people finding the caches. They'd probably just take the cash and sell the weapon and passport. It was the Firm that concerned me.

They would always be on the hunt for safety blankets. They knew any deniable operator worth his salt would have one. If mine was compromised, they'd have my new ID, my credit card details; they could let me run from the UK, allowing me to think I had evaporated, then just wait and see where I pitched up with my new passport and card, and do whatever they felt like doing.

I thought about Marc Richardson, who I'd bumped into in Zurich a couple of years earlier and set out to clone. He was a bit younger than me, but we looked vaguely similar.

I'd found him working in a bar in Mühlegasse, a notorious gay cruising ground. It's the best kind of place for what I had in mind, whatever country you're in. Marc had been living and working in Zurich for a couple of years. He had a steady job, and shared an apartment with his Swiss partner in the city. Most important of all, he had no intention of going back to England. I learnt all this as I got to know him over a couple of weeks; I'd pop into his bar when I knew it was his shift, and we'd chat. I met other gay men there, but they didn't have what Marc had. He was the one for me.

When I got back to the UK, I signed up to an online genealogical site and set about scouring the registers between 1960 and 1965 for his date of birth and his father's and mother's names. He hadn't liked to talk to me about his past, and I could never get anything more out of him than where he was born; trying to dig any deeper would have aroused suspicion. Besides, his partner was getting all territorial. It only took an hour to find him.

Marc Richardson the Second was soon the proud owner of a brand-new ten-year passport, complete with biometric chip. The Identity and Passport Service didn't provide it, of course. Brendan Coogan did.

Coogan was either a stickler for detail or just liked a laugh, because he even handed me the booklet that came with real passports. I nearly fell onto Coogan's kitchen floor laughing when I read it. I'm glad I didn't. His house made NHS wards seem almost sterile.

It told me that the IPS took Marc's security and privacy very seriously. The new British biometric passport met international standards, and they were confident that it was one of the most secure available. It featured many new security features which would show if the passport had been tampered with, and the facial biometrics on the chip would help link the passport holder to the document.

What was more, the data on the chip, Marc's photo and personal information would be protected against theft through the use of 'advanced digital encryption techniques'. The chip would complement the security features currently inherent in the passport, including the 'machine readable zone' on the personal data page.

The chip contained Marc's signature (from a joke bet I'd got him to sign that England would win the next World Cup) to show the encoded data was genuine; the place of issue; a secure access protocol; and the benefit of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) digital encryption technology, which provides protection against changes in encoded data. I'd never felt so secure.

I opened up an accommodation address in Marc's name, then went to the council offices and registered him on the electoral roll. I also applied for a duplicate of his driver's licence, which arrived from the DVLA just a few days later.

Over the next few months I signed up with several book and record clubs; I even bought a collection of porcelain thimbles out of a Sunday supplement, paying with a postal order. In return, I got a fistful of bills and receipts, all issued to the accommodation address.

Next I wrote to two or three of the high street banks and asked them a string of questions that made it sound as if I was a serious investor. I received suitably grovelling letters in reply, on the bank's letterhead. Then all I did was walk into a building society, played stupid, and said I would like to open a bank account, please. As long as you have your address on the appropriate documentation, they don't seem to look much further.

I put a few quid in my new account and let it tick over. After a few weeks I got some standing orders up and running with the book clubs, and at last I was ready to apply for a credit card. As long as you're on the electoral register, have a bank account and no bad credit history, the card is yours. And once you have one card, all the other banks and finance houses will fall over themselves to make sure you take theirs as well.

I thought about going one step further and getting myself a National Insurance number, but there was really no point. I had money to use and a card that would get me out of the UK. Cash payments can be flagged up by airlines as out of the norm. With a card, I could go online, book, print off my boarding card, and be away in a matter of hours. The UK blanket was created in the same way.

I replaced the key fob, then gave Lynn another hundred pounds. 'We need a change of clothes. But first, we've got to go to Woolworths.'

I half expected him to ask me who that was.