He knew how to research missing persons cases to find individuals whose circumstances offered the best opportunity for a plausible impersonation.

He knew how to cover the gaps in his knowledge with stories about trauma, about memory loss, about the effects of what he had supposedly experienced.

In October 1997, he was in Linares, Spain.

He had recently been impersonating a young French boy there, but that particular fiction was running out of room.

The Spanish authorities were looking at him skeptically.

He needed a new identity.