Leah used her flashlight to see what was beneath her. She found that she was coming down only a foot or so from the front counter, where the customers came for service. She swung on the rope a little so her feet would reach the counter, and then stood. She took off the rope and jumped to the floor. There was a wall of mailboxes with combination locks in the front. She walked around it to the backside, where the clerks were supposed to stick the mail for postal box renters. She reached in one and looked at the pieces of mail.

They were old. One held a copy of Newsweek from 2009. Most of the letters in the boxes needed dusting. The wall of mailboxes looked good from in front of the counter, but it wasn’t real.

She moved on to the back of the room, where there was a door. She tried the knob, but it was locked. She stepped back, raised her right leg, and gave the door a stomp-kick of the sort that she had used in raids. The door cracked on the first try and swung open on the second.

She let the beam of her flashlight play across the shapes in the back room.

There was a large photocopier, or maybe it was a scanner. There was a long tablelike machine that appeared to be a four-color printing press. She walked the room, past workbenches that had machines on them attached to computers. She read the riveted-on metal plates that gave the model and serial numbers. One was an embossing machine. Near it was a machine that said it was a seventy-two-character stamping machine for use with 0.03-thickness plastic card stock, with magnetic-stripe coating.

Credit cards, Leah thought. They didn’t just make driver’s licenses like the one the girl in the restaurant had. They could make credit cards.

She kept looking. The plate on one machine said it was sold by Miss Ling of Beijing, China. No address, no company name. She assumed it must be illegal.

The next one was a few sizes bigger, from desktop size to desk size. The label said it was an “instant issuance system.” It said this one had not only mag-stripe but also chip data coding, and it could embed holograms. It said it was compatible with Windows, Mac, and GNU Linux.

She had found the source, the shop where Viktor Panko and his friends—and an unknown number of other people—had gotten their new identification documents.