How had this woman done all this, thought Madeline, looking at the four ziploc bags in her drawer. It was, wow, she didn’t know what it was, but she realized she had developed a childlike grin of her own. She looked more closely at each of her ‘basement’ identities. Each bag contained a driver’s license, social, credit card and, in two cases, a passport. One of the passports was not American. She picked up that bag.

Inside she found her photo on all its contents, but a strange name, and someone else’s details, even on the Australian passport.

“How?” Madeline was astonished, and she brandished the passport in the air as she stared incredulous at the woman. A week, for god’s sake. A week. In that time Madeline had managed to quit her job, pack a few bags, give notice she was breaking her lease, and get back on a plane, and it had felt like a very full seven days. This woman had fabricated sixteen personalities, broken more laws than Madeline could name, and bought clothes to dress the five thousand.

Ayala ignored the question of how, it was not important, or even recommended, that they know the ins and outs. Instead, she took the passport from Madeline and smiled at the name it had so neatly printed on its pages. “Yes, for you, I’ve revived some of my old names. I had plenty. I haven’t used these identities in a while, but they are still good,” she said, handing the document back to Madeline. “The back stories are infallible, they’ve been out there for twenty years and I fabricated them myself. The credit cards are new, you’ll need to maintain those. As one of a host of tasks associated with maintaining all this, we will have to follow a process to remotely pay all these. Can’t have them all associated with this address so we will have to log in remotely, using ghost IPs. But that is for another day, the important thing is that we don’t miss a payment, not one, no matter how small. It seems petty but we want to avoid any unnecessary attention on these identities. They must all be model citizens, clear? So that also means no speeding, running red lights, stop signs, not even jay walking.”

Madeline nodded again, returning the passport to its bag and placing it back in her drawer, somber again at the severity of it all.

But Neal broke the mood, piping up like a boy who wants his mom’s approval, “Ayala had to fake the colonel’s and mine from scratch, I have an American and British one.” He put on an appalling British accent for a moment, something between cockney and heat stroke, “Yoo kan caull muy Jones, Maark Jones.” he said, and laughed.