Gideon's War/Hard Target Read Online Free PDF Page B

Once upon a time he’d been with the Company. But there had been a minor misunderstanding about some receipts for supplies, and now he had to take whatever work he could get. Even for guys like this troglodyte creep in the baseball cap. Barry Wine had operated out of Singapore for a while, but the tax situation was better here in Mohan. And now he was holding the bloodstained passport for some poor bastard named Cole Ransom. The humorless guy in the baseball cap wanted him to replace the photo of the real guy with a photo of himself. Artists referred to this as a “face pull.”
    Barry Wine was a perfectionist, so he didn’t like face pulling. It offended his dignity and professionalism. Face pulling was a crude and thuggish procedure that any high school art student could do. If you were a serious professional, you did a “fab”—a complete fabrication of the passport. But a perfect fab took two to three weeks. And that was only if you could get your hands on the right kind of paper.
    “Did I ever tell you about that Bulgarian passport I did for our mutual friend?” Barry Wine said. “The Bulgarian passport—it’s the one and only artistic achievement of any note in the entire history of the Bulgarian people. Absolute work of art. The flash page is intaglio printed if you can believe that. All the paper is manufactured at this very small factory near the Turkish border. Seven unique colors of hand-dyed security threads. Silk threads. They even have a security feature that’s unique to the Bulgarians. An integral magstripe made from powdered magnetite that’s literally impregnated into the paper. Impregnated! No plastic film involved. None whatsoever. I had to paint it in with this tiny hog-bristle paintbrush—”
    The bearded man looked at Barry Wine with his empty black eyes.
    “Sorry,” Barry Wine said. “Sorry. I just need to get your picture inserted in the passport. It’ll take awhile. Feel free to grab some lunch and come back.”
    The bearded man didn’t move.
    The artist was eager to do anythisoe D‡ng that would get the man’s eyes off of him. He pushed the Gucci bag with the rest of the documents in it across the table toward the man in the camouflage hat. “It’s all there. Feel free to review them. Company IDs, Social Security card, credit cards, you name it. I even threw in a library card from the Baton Rouge Central Library. Which I thought was a nice touch.”
    Barry Wine waited for some kind of approval or appreciation for his extra effort. But all he got was a tight nod. So he returned his attention to the passport.
    He sharpened his X-Acto knife on a 1200-grit diamond stone using a small jig of his own design and then carefully slit the plastic that sealed Cole Ransom’s picture into the passport. It took about twenty minutes to affix the new image. He used a special solvent he’d developed himself to make the line between the new overseal and the old overseal fade away. You could never make it completely disappear of course. It would get his client past most customs agents and border patrol checkpoints, but Wine still scowled at the passport. Hackwork. This was absolute hackwork and butchery. Nobody cared about quality anymore. Back when he’d started you actually had to learn your craft. Engraving, printing, dye work, the list went on and on. But now all these assholes wanted you to do was slap something in a copy machine. You might as well just go to Kinkos!
    He slid the face-pulled passport across the table to his customer. “Here. Notice what I did with the—”
    The bearded man swept it up and stuck it in his pocket.
    “You’re not even gonna look at it?”
    The man reached across the table, picked up the X-Acto knife.
    “Careful,” Barry Wine said. “That’s very sharp.”
    “I know,” the bearded man said, before he plunged it deep into Barry Wine’s left eye.
    Two hours later Detective Senior Grade Wafiq Kalil walked into a small office in central Kota Mohan with