out the task himself, but for a job this big - with so much money on the line and no room for error - he felt it was worth it to farm the work out to a specialist. X knew at once whom he wanted for the job: An ancient Italian master named D'Amato who worked out of a room above a pizza parlor in Little Italy. He had started out making funny money during the Depression, apprenticing under a counterfeiter who churned out bogus $5 bills.
D'Amato had promised X the passport would be ready by 5 p.m. that Friday. X arrived an hour early because he loved to watch the old man work. Bent, gray and wrinkled as a prune, D'Amato was a master craftsman. It was like watching some old-world violin repairman tune a Stradivarius.
X watched, fascinated, as D'Amato fed a blank passport into a laser printer. The most common error of amateurs, X knew, was to print out a blank stolen passport in the wrong typeface. D'Amato would make no such errors.
"Patience is the key," the old man informed X for the perhaps the 20th time.
The trickiest part was to recreate the official government seal, the inkless stamp that leaves an embossed image on paper.
X watched with fascination as the old man placed an old vinyl record - A Tony Bennett LP - over a passport marked with a real seal, then heating the record with an iron, took an imprint. He then pressed the record onto the bogus passport - and when he withdrew it, a perfect duplicate of the seal appeared, raised and all.
"Most of these young wannabe scratchers out there today have never even held a vinyl record, let alone know how to do anything like this," D'Amato grumbled. "Without their Macs, they'd be helpless."
X loved to hear about such tricks of the trade.
"In the old days, we would cut a fresh potato in half and use it to transfer a stamp from one passport to another," D'Amato said. "Today most young folks put all their faith in computers. THIS is perfect." He kissed his handiwork for emphasis.
The duplicate of Ali Nazeer's 2007 passport didn't require the insertion of an RFID chip - it was made before the widespread use of electronic passports. All that was needed was a magnetic stripe and bar code.
It made X a bit sad to think that in this high-tech era, with paperless identification such as retinal scans growing in popularity, D'Amato would soon be obsolete and would probably be puttering around in his daughter's garden in a few years. On the other hand, X expected that the trend would be a boon to identity thieves such as himself. He and his colleagues were already using their wireless scanners to read e-passports at close range - electronically pickpocketing airport passengers of their passport information.
In any event, Al Nazeer's real passport had been issued long enough ago that the old-school approach was just what the doctor ordered.
D'Amato handed X the dummy Al Nazeer passport and the genuine Kuwaiti one he'd used as a model. Except for the names, passport number and salient data - which X double-checked for accuracy - the fake travel document was indistinguishable from the real McCoy.
"Great work as usual, Tony," he said, handing over an envelope stuffed with cash.
X was satisfied with the result. There are more than a dozen different versions of the United States passport alone in circulation. It would take a bona fide passport scholar to be able to detect the difference between a real and a fake Kuwaiti passport.
The mark, X was able to ascertain by running a game on a Kuwaiti airline staffer, wasn't scheduled to visit America again for another two months. That gave them nearly 60 days for X to impersonate him, and hopefully, suck up his money like a vacuum cleaner.
To get a fuller picture of Al Nazeer, Samantha phoned his credit card company fraud prevention number, claiming to be the fat cat's executive secretary. Informing the customer service representative that her boss was concerned that there was suspicious activity on the account, she requested detailed records