Haggai Harmon - The Chameleon Conspiracy

At four thirty p.m. I returned to my hotel with the cab, and checked in.

“Welcome, Mr. Van Laufer,” said the smiling reception-desk employee when I told him my name. “How was your flight?”

“Too long,” I said.

“Can I see your passport, please?”

“Sure,” I said and gave him my Dutch Guiana passport. Dutch Guiana ceased to exist in 1975, when it gained independence from the Netherlands and became Suriname. For a non ex is tent country, the passport I gave him was a work of art. It even had a registration number and an “official” seal, an authentic-looking cover embossed with gold lettering, and my genuine laminated photo. Its pages carried many visa and authentic-looking entry and exit stamps from very valid and existing countries. Unless you were a geography buff, you couldn’t tell the passport and the stamps were faked. It looked like a real passport, but it wasn’t.

Before going on assignment to Third World countries, or even to Western Europe, when my adversaries are no gentlemen, I assume a different identity. Due to political sensitivities, most of the time I cannot use a real passport issued by another country, unless I received it from that country’s government. (If the assignment is for the CIA, it’s a different ball game.) When crossing borders on routine Department of Justice cases, I always use a very genuine U.S. passport, almost always my standard dark-blue tourist passport. I have to carry my official U.S. government passport while overseas on official U.S. government business. But its distinctive dark-red cover is nothing to show when standing in a long line of strangers waiting to pass a foreign immigration agent. For other identification purposes, particularly when nongovernmental entities are involved, I resort to second best, passports “issued” by a service carrying names of countries that have changed, or even better, never existed. What’s the chance that an average hotel receptionist or banker will know that British Honduras is now Belize, that Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, or that Zanzibar merged with Tanganyika to become Tanzania? With the declining popularity of Americans abroad, better to be a businessman from Dutch Guiana than a U.S. government agent.

During my Mossad days, the standards and practices were different regarding the use of passports. Admittedly, though, times were also different. Things that were acceptable in the early seventies may be no-no’s now, and vice versa. I still remembered Alex, my Mossad academy instructor, lecturing on the various uses of passports: We grade passports according to the security they afford the user-best, second, action, and disposable. The best passports, which are at the top of the list, are genuine passports with real people’s names that could survive a police check in the country of origin. The second-quality passport is also a genuine passport. However, there’s no real person to match the bio page. The third type is an action passport that could be used while performing a quick job-concluded in a matter of days- in a foreign country, but that’s it. We can’t use it to cross national borders, definitely not through airports. The least valuable is the disposable passport. This one’s usually hot, meaning that it was either lost or stolen and therefore probably appears on most police watch lists. The best part of that passport is its cover, because it can serve its purpose when you need only to flash it. Obviously you can’t use it as an ID, unless you opt to be stupid, depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.

Apparently, the hotel employee at the desk wasn’t a geography maven, because he didn’t even blink at my passport. I had already made up a “legend,” a cover for why I don’t speak Dutch, or why I was so much lighter than my supposed countrymen, not looking like the citizens of Dutch Guiana-now Suriname-who have much darker skin than mine. If asked, I could simply say that my father was a doctor, an eye specialist in tropical ailments, and I was born in Dutch Guiana when he was sent by the UN to help fight eye disease. Nationality? I don’t really have one. At the age of four we moved to Switzerland. I studied in South Africa and Canada. My father was born in Germany to a Swedish father and a Czech mother; my mother was born in Hungary. Her father was Romanian and her mother Greek. My parents escaped their countries just when World War II started. That legend usually does it and has always satisfied people’s curiosity.

I also knew that being born in Dutch Guiana didn’t by it-self confer citizenship. You needed one parent or grandparent with citizenship through whom you could claim it. If pressed, I’d have come up with a Dutch grandparent for the purpose. But I’d never needed to. In my wallet I also carried a Dutch Guiana driver’s license and a genuine Visa credit card issued to Peter Helmut van Laufer by one of those offshore banks that don’t ask too many questions about your true identity or the source of the money you’re caching away, as long as you don’t ask them why they charge an annual fee of $750 for the card. I also had another camouflage passport of another non ex is tent country carrying my real name, as well as my genuine official U.S. government and tourist passports, just in case a suspicious banker called the local police.

If that happened, I could say, Oops, sorry, wrong passport. It’s my old name, legally changed. Here’s my other passport. I’d choose whether to flash my other camouflage passport, or, if push came to shove, and only as a last resort, my U.S. tourist passport, hoping I’d be allowed one phone call to the U.S. consul. The amount of explanation I’d have to offer the consul would probably exceed the amount of money suggested by a local policeman as contribution to shore up his personal finances and smooth things up. Never would I show my official passport. That could guarantee a free ride to jail in any country that regarded intelligence as the exclusive prerogative of that country’s government. Violators go to jail, and the guaranteed result would be the size of the scandal, not whether it had actually erupted.

The hotel’s lobby was half empty. I leafed through the local Yellow Pages and called Peninsula Bank, using my mobile phone.

“I’m the business manager of Wild Nature and Adventure magazine, based in South Africa,” I said. “We plan to establish a small office in Islamabad. I’d like to open an account with your bank.”

“Of course, sir. Please come to our branch. We’ll be happy to assist you.”

I took a cab and landed at the manager’s desk in thirty minutes.

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” said the manager, a heavy-set, middle-aged man with jumbo ears and piercing black eyes. He wore a three-piece wool suit with a chained gold watch tucked in the vest’s pocket. Hell, I thought, this isn’t London circa 1930, it’s Islamabad in 2004, and it’s hot in here.

He shook my hand. “My name is Rashid Khan.” I looked at him thinking that for him, the happy hour is a nap.

I gave him my business card-Peter Helmut van Laufer, with an address in Amsterdam.

“This is our temporary European office, which we are closing next week. There isn’t too much wildlife in Europe anymore,” I said with a smile. “So, for the time being let me give you my number in Islamabad: 051 991 6687.” He wrote it down on my business card. “We intend to open in Pakistan our regional office for Asia. Until I have Pakistani incorporation papers for our local company, perhaps I should open a temporary personal account.”

“No need to wait, sir,” said Rashid. “I can open an account for the magazine immediately. When you receive the certificate of incorporation, please send me a copy.”

An hour later I had a bank account for Wild Nature and Adventure Magazine. I deposited $500 in cash.