The Racketeer

the same time. Incredible.”
    “What about your bar?” I ask Nathan.
    “I own the place,” he says smugly. “And I got a pretty good manager. Plus, I’d like to get outta town for a few days. The bar is ten, twelve hours a day, six days a week.”
    “And your parole officer?”
    “I’m free to travel. I just have to notify him, that’s all.”
    “This is exciting,” Gwen says, almost squealing with delight. Nathan is smiling like a kid at Christmas. Me, I’m all business as usual. “Look, Nathan, I need to nail this down right now. If we’re going, then say so. I have to call Nicky and line up the jet, and I have to call Tad so he can arrange flights for the other families. Yes or no?”
    Without hesitation, Nathan says, “Yep. Let’s go.”
    “Great.”
    Gwen asks, “Which hotel would Nathan like, Reed?”
    “I don’t know. They’re all good. Your call.” I tap keys on my phone and begin another unilateral conversation.
    “You want to be right on the beach, Nathan, or one block off?”
    “Where are the girls?” he asks and laughs at his own incredible humor.
    “Okay, on the beach it is.”
    By the time we return to Radford, Nathan Cooley thinks he’s booked into one of the coolest hotels in the world, on one of thehippest beaches, and he’ll arrive there by private jet, which will only be fitting for such a serious actor.

    Vanessa leaves in a mad dash for Reston, Virginia, D.C. suburbs, some four hours away. Her first destination is a nameless organization renting space in a run-down strip mall. It’s the workshop of a group of talented forgers who can create virtually any document on the spot. They specialize in fake passports, but for the right price they can produce college diplomas, birth certificates, marriage licenses, court orders, car titles, eviction notices, driver’s licenses, credit histories—there’s no limit to their mischief. Some of what they do is illegal and some is not. They brazenly advertise on the Internet, along with an astonishing number of competitors, but claim to be careful about whom they work for.
    I found them several weeks ago after an exhaustive search, and to validate their reliability, I sent a $500 check drawn on Skelter Films for a fake passport. It arrived in Florida a week later, and I was floored at its seeming authenticity. According to the guy on the phone, a real expert, there was an eighty-twenty chance the fake passport would clear Customs in the event I tried to leave the country. There was a 90 percent chance I would be able to enter any country in the Caribbean. Problems will arise, though, if I try to reenter the United States. I explained that this will not happen, not with my new fake passport. He explained that nowadays, in the age of terror, the U.S. Customs Service is much more concerned with who’s on the No Fly List than who’s fudging with phony papers.
    Because it’s a rush job, Vanessa forks over $1,000 in cash, and they get down to business. Her forger is a nervous geek with an odd name that he reluctantly divulged. Like his colleagues, he works in a cramped, fortified cubicle with no one else in sight.The atmosphere is suspicious, as though everyone there is violating some law and half expecting a SWAT team any minute. They don’t like drop-ins. They prefer the shield of the Internet so no one sees their shady business.
    Vanessa hands over the memory card from her camera, and on a twenty-inch screen they look at the shots of a smiling Nathan Cooley. They select one for the passport and driver’s license, and go through his data—address, date of birth, and so on. Vanessa says she wants the new documents in the name of Nathaniel Coley, not Cooley. Whatever, the geek says. He could not care less. He is soon lost in a flurry of high-speed imaging. It takes him an hour to produce an American passport and a Virginia driver’s license that would fool anyone. The passport’s blue vinyl binding is sufficiently worn, and our boy Nathan, who’s never traveled far, has now seen all of Europe and most of Asia.
    Vanessa hustles into D.C., where she picks up two first-aid kits, a pistol, and some pills. At 8:30, she turns around and heads south for Roanoke.

CHAPTER 33
    T he airplane is a Challenger 604, one of the finer private jets available for charter. Its cabin seats eight comfortably and allows those under six feet two to move around without scraping the ceiling. A new one costs something like $30 million, according to