me book an airline ticket with your credit card. I’ll pay you in cash for that as well. I need to take a trip but don’t want someone to know where I’m going. That’s all there is to this. In one week I return everything. If something goes wrong, you just have to say that your passport and credit card were stolen and you didn’t notice right away. There’s no downside to this.”
Bram thought for a moment, then said, “I’ll do it for fifteen thousand pounds.”
Corbin stood up. “I’ll keep looking. There’ll be someone else ’round here that looks like me.”
Corbin returned his empty pint glass to the bar and exited the pub. Bram caught up with him on the street. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
Bram Heymans was squatting in a large nearby flat that was under construction, sleeping on a rollout and living out of a backpack. Despite this, he had an Apple laptop and a portable wireless router. Corbin studied Bram’s maroon passport. In the picture Bram was clean-shaven, his hair swept back off his forehead. Corbin had been hoping that the picture would have the bearded version of Bram, but the clean-shaven picture was good enough. Corbin would pass as Bram, so long as he didn’t draw too much attention to himself. There were no flights going to Logan for the remainder of that day, so Corbin, using Bram’s Visa card, booked an early morning flight for the following day. He gave Bram the eight thousand pounds, plus an extra eight hundred for the ticket, and took possession of the passport.
“You’ll still be here in a week?” Corbin asked Bram, who was flicking through the bills with a nicotine-stained thumb.
“What, here? In this flat?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, I’m not going anywhere.”
“So one week from today I’ll be back here with your passport and ID. At noon. You’ll be here?”
“I’ll be here,” Bram said, still looking at the bills.
The line at the Gatwick security gate was at least a hundred travelers long, but Corbin was early. He was happy to see the crowd; it would hopefully mean that whoever looked at his passport might rush the job, not studying the picture too hard. Corbin had been anxiously analyzing the small photo all through the night and into the morning, trying to decide if it was going to work. He thought it would, especially since the picture was seven years old. He had been trying to decide whether it would be better to keep his current style or to imitate the hairstyle in the photograph, and decided to keep his current style. If the hairstyles were perfect then the security agent, or the customs agent in Boston, might look too closely at the facial features, realize that the eyes weren’t quite right, the ears entirely different.
The hungover-looking agent at the end of the line barely looked at the passport after placing it on the scanner, just perfunctorily moving his eyes from the picture to Corbin’s face, then ushering him through toward security.
It was a little rockier in Boston, where they’d recently installed Automated Passport Control. Corbin stood in front of a computer screen, scanned his passport, then stood still and stared at a camera, waiting to have his photograph taken. He hadn’t been prepared for this, and his heart sped up as he waited for the camera to flash. Instead, words appeared on the screen—the machine had failed to capture a recognizable face—and Corbin thought he was finished, that some software program was figuring out that the face in front of them didn’t match the face on the passport. Corbin tried the picture again and got the same message. A customs agent drifted over, adjusted the height of the machine, and it worked. A light flashed, and a slip of curled paper slid from the machine—a black-and-white image of Corbin’s alarmed face. He brought the slip of paper and his passport to another agent, a young acne-ridden man with a military-looking mustache, who grilled Corbin about his trip to the United States, asking him where he was staying and how long he planned to stay, and studying the passport, although paying relatively little attention to the picture. Finally, the customs agent stamped Bram Heymans’s passport and Corbin, armpits damp but otherwise okay, walked through the double doors into Logan airport. He could see through the terminal, and the large sliding doors, to the taxis idling on the curb outside; he was free, unmoored. He was in America and no one