Haggai Harmon - The Chameleon Conspiracy

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and find information on more than one student from one alumnus or alumna.”

We attached the list of all students without listed Social Security numbers to an encrypted file and sent it back to the State Department, asking them to locate any available information on the individuals on the list.

“So we’re done,” Nicole said breezily. “What should we do now?” There still wasn’t a hint of what do you suggest we do for the rest of the evening? Thus far she hadn’t used anything but coolly professional talk in our interactions. This was the most casual she’d been.

“Dinner?” asked Nicole, looking at me curiously. All of a sudden there was a personal tone to her question. Did that blonde iceberg have a personal life? Maybe there was lava brewing underneath the cold facade. I wasn’t going to explore it, at least not yet. We went out to a nearby corner bistro to have dinner.

Still at the restaurant an hour later, I had a glass of 1990 Chateau Petrus Merlot in my hand and was feeling pensive. “We shouldn’t rule out the possibility that new aliases have been substituted for the ones adopted twenty-five years ago.”

Nicole frowned. “Do I understand you correctly? Instead of looking for the Chameleon in a group of a few hundred graduates of the American School in Tehran, we’ll be looking for an unknown number of people in a U.S. population of nearly three hundred million where, on an average day, more than one million people enter the United States legally and thousands more enter illegally?”

“I understand where you’re coming from,” I said, keeping calm. “But it’s not our job to look for them in the U.S. We’ve got an assignment to find the Chameleon and whoever his comrades are. Now, I hope we get to solve the mystery of whether there are additional members of Department 81 in the U.S., but it’s the FBI counterintelligence and counterterrorism sections’ problem, not ours.” I was starting to realize that maybe Nicole enjoyed being the sounding board for my crazy ideas. Her challenging questions were actually stimulants in what had become our mutual brainstorming.

As they placed our platters in front of us-juicy steak frites for me, buttered mussels for her-my mobile phone vibrated.

I glanced at its display. “There’s a communication waiting for us at the apartment.”

“It can wait,” said Nicole, and I couldn’t have agreed more.

When we’d finished our well-deserved dinner, we returned to the safe apartment. Nicole went to the communication room and minutes later handed me a memo from the State Department. It read, “We have cross-referenced all student names without listed SSNs against other databases. The number of individuals matching the criteria you set brought down the number of students whose whereabouts are unknown to thirty-four.” The list was attached.

I quickly ran my eyes down the list. “We got him,” I said slowly and decisively. Number twenty-one on the list was Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, an ethnic Iranian born in Tabriz, in northern Iran, on August 19, 1960. The short bio included additional background information. There were also passport-type photos of all but three men included in the list.

With mounting excitement, I inspected the photos. I didn’t waste any time. In a photo marked as Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, I saw the Chameleon looking at me. I pulled out the photo of Albert C. Ward that I had received from his school’s principal, and compared the two. Both showed their subject at eighteen. But there was no doubt that they were of two different people. I didn’t have a photo of Kourosh Alireza Farhadi from when he assumed Ward’s identity, or later, when he impersonated Herbert Goldman. But I was already convinced that Farhadi was Goldman too. I had identified the Chameleon.

“Nicole!” I cried, startling her. “We found him. Here’s the bastard. We’ve got the evidence.”

Nicole looked at the pictures. “Which one is he?” “That’s the one.” I pointed at Farhadi’s photo. “I can identify him anywhere. He’s in my dreams.”

Nicole wasn’t budging until she saw some hard evidence. “We need a positive ID. Do you want to repeat the humiliation in Sydney?”

“What humiliation?” I responded. “I was right and they were wrong. Now the FBI owes me an apology. Big-time.”

Nicole only raised an eyebrow.

Ice must run through icy liquid in her veins, I thought.

She inspected the photo, read the State Department’s note, and said, “Why don’t we e-mail the photo to Peter Maxwell in Sydney? He also met Goldman. Let’s see what he thinks.”

“Fine by me,” I said. Her obsession with double-checking everything was starting to get to me, but there was little I could do. I waited as she went to her laptop and e-mailed the photo to Sydney.

An hour later, as I skimmed the bits of information the State Department file had on the graduates of the American School in Tehran, Nicole walked in from the communication room. “We’ve got an answer from Peter Maxwell,” she said. “He cautiously believes the person they arrested and later hospitalized is the same person shown in the photo taken many years earlier of Kourosh Alireza Farhadi.”

“What a surprise,” I said drily.

Later, near midnight, a buzz at the apartment intercom heralded the unexpected arrival of Bob Holliday and Casey Bauer.

“Evening,” said Bob. “We’ve got a few more questions.”

“Before I answer you, let me bring you up to speed on the recent developments,” I said, showing them the State Department report and Maxwell’s e-mail.

Bob barely kept his composure when he exclaimed, “Hot damn, that’s fantastic! Do you think Kourosh is still in Australia?”

“I’d be surprised if he was,” said Nicole. “We now know he wasn’t operating alone or independently, so we can safely assume that he has help outside and inside many countries.”

“Australia may have become too hot for him,” I agreed. “The Australian Federal Police told your office that there are no records showing that either Herbert Goldman or Albert Ward III, or any individual with any of the aliases we knew, had left the country. If we rule out swimming, then Kourosh must have used travel documents using another alias to leave Australia. Nicole has asked the Australian Federal Police for a computerized list of the names of all males leaving Australia during the five-day period after he was released from detention at the hospital.

“We expect to get the list in a few days, but the Australians have already cautioned us that the list would exceed fifty thousand names,” I continued. “We’ll provide the NSA with an electronic copy and ask them to match the names on the list against their various databases. We’ll ask the FBI and the CIA to do the same. I don’t have high hopes in that direction, but we must try. Kourosh knew that the U.S. government was after him. So he isn’t likely to have used a passport that could be on somebody’s watch list.”

We all knew what that meant-a stolen passport, one whose theft would have been reported to Interpol, which would have notified police in all 177 or so member countries. Soon enough, border control in almost every country would have its details.

“So by what means do you think Kourosh has left Australia?” asked Casey.

“I tend to think that if he has indeed left, he used a freshly forged passport, one that had never been used,” I said. “When you’re exiting a country, passport inspection is rather lax. At most, the officer checks if your name appears on a wanted list, or more likely, if you overstayed your visit. So exiting is less of a problem. However, if you use a forged passport to travel, safe entry is the main problem. Therefore, your destination should be a country which you can easily enter, either because the ability of that country’s passport control officers to detect forgery is limited, or because Iran can pull strings and get her agents to enter quickly with no questions asked.”