Hernando handed over the files and took the cash in return.  Although he had no knowledge of the people that would be affected, he knew that they were in for a very troublesome time. 

  

He wondered fleetingly how extensive the damage would be, but quickly put it out of his consciousness.  After all, he was just doing his job, and the job made no allowances for a conscience.  And he was sure that he was privileged to be doing his patriotic duty.  

  

Besides, it was great to be part of the Federal Government, although he kept that a life or death secret.  Of course he was a low level operative, basically no more than a messenger.  But he felt good to be able to cloak himself with such a sense of belonging.  His bosses depended on him as a vital link in passing the social security numbers and other personal information to the vast underground network of identification thieves without any danger of the activity being connected to them.     

  

He felt good about lobbing these ID theft bombs into the middle of his bosses’ political and ideological adversaries’ lives.  The underground was very useful in the political power game.  It didn’t take long for the word to get out that your life could easily be ruined if you bucked the ideology of the greedy and power hungry now in control of the government’s levers of destruction.  The mere threat could be devastating after a few “case studies” became known in the halls of power, or to vocal dissenters among the citizenry, as the case may be.

  

Although he did not know who the ultimate boss was, he had his suspicions.  It made him think of Sumo Wrestling, these politicians and worse belly bucking each other out of the ring.  But his suspected ultimate boss, the largest Sumo ever, never even appeared in the public ring, but wrestled deviously from an undisclosed location.