Haggai Harmon - The Chameleon Conspiracy

“Other than Iran, which countries meet that requirement?” asked Bob.

“Syria,” said Casey. “North Korea. A few more.”

“Bear in mind that in many countries, particularly in the Third World, a $20 bill can go a long way,” I added.

Bob smiled. “I hope you’re not doing it.” He was thinking about my work for DOJ, while I meant operating outside the rules, any rules.

“There could be a twist here,” Nicole suggested. “For example. Kourosh could hold a ticket from Sydney to Italy with a stopover in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Cairo, Egypt. He could leave Australia using a forged passport and be met by an Iranian agent while in transit at the Jakarta airport. The agent would give him another passport to enter Italy, or a new airline ticket from Jakarta directly to Iran. So if an electronic monitoring of his movements is made, the airline computer will show he ended his trip in Jakarta, and searchers will focus their efforts on Indonesia, while in fact he continued his trip to another location such as Iran using a passport with a different name.”

“I agree,” I said. “I’ve been down that road myself to avoid FOE-forces of evil. There’s no reason why a trained top Iranian agent who’s been successfully avoiding the law for more than two decades wouldn’t be capable of pulling it off.” I shook my head. “I wish I could put my hands on him now!” I clenched my fists in rage.

“Dan, calm down,” said Casey. “We want to preserve his ability to talk.”

Was he referring to rough encounters I’d had with a few of my targets, who had required a convalescence period before they could be interrogated again? I decided not to raise the issue.

“Of course you do,” I said, matter-of-factly, and quickly moved on to change the subject. “He seems to steal money to provide off-the-books slush financing, probably for Iran’s web of terror. That makes him a prime target for us. When he’s caught, we’ll have to wrap him up in cotton wool to make sure he doesn’t catch cold, get sick, or anything, so that he talks and lives through a lengthy prison term.”

Casey and Bob were getting ready to leave. Bauer turned to us. “Dan and Nicole, we need your full written report, including case summary covering all events that took place before you received the case.” He looked at me. “Start from the fraud perpetrated against that South Dakota savings bank in 1985, through your discovery in Australia, your visit to Pakistan, the most recent matching of the prints, and the NSA findings. End it with your recommendations, including suggested cooperation with the Israeli Mossad. Let me see it by Monday, then we’ll talk.”

“What do you think?” I asked Nicole as soon as Bob and Casey had left.

“I think Casey and Bob like the recent developments. It finally confines our case to a location. I have no idea how NSA got that information, and therefore we can’t weigh its credibility.”

“Recent developments?” I said. “Are you kidding? This is a major breakthrough. And you really don’t know how NSA got it? Come on. Computer hacking perpetrated by a private individual sends him to jail. But when an NSA technician does it, he gets an award. We now have four different sources, with varying credibility, that are in de pen dent of one another. They all put the spotlight on Iran.”

“Four?”

“Yes, my Pakistani source, Benny’s information, the FBI fingerprints report, the State Department’s file, and Maxwell’s confirmation.”

“That’s five,” said Nicole. “OK, let’s see what value these clues carry.”

We went back to the drawing board and reviewed most of what we had already learned. “The first clue came when I’d gone to Pakistan and bought information from that sleazy lawyer in Islamabad, Ahmed Khan. He’d told me that Ward was lured into coming to Iran with a promise to pay him $500 a month for three months. In fact, it was a kept promise, because he had actually received that money. When I’d first heard about that amount of money, it had flagged an ulterior motive immediately. Nobody pays a twenty-year-old photo-grapher $500 a month in 1980 dollars for taking some pictures during an archaeological excavation, when most others volunteer their work. Dr. Fischer and Professor Krieger had told us that most of the diggers were either volunteer students working for food and university credits, or two-to-three-dollar-a-day Iranian peasants doing the actual digging,” I said.

“And you don’t know that the information Khan sold you actually came from Iran. Right?” Nicole pressed. “You said the lawyer was sleazy.”

“Right. In fact, all the information he gave me might have come from his associate or relative, Rashid Khan, the bank manager. Ahmed Khan told me that Ward bought Iranian currency, and that there was a deposit exceeding $500 into his bank account, most of it still there. He also said that a successor in interest of the transferring bank, which we know was a center for distributing terror money, later tried to reverse the transfer. So the logical conclusion is that Ahmed Khan, the lawyer, was simply a conduit that Rashid Khan, the corrupt bank manager, used to sell me information, without compromising himself as breaching banking-secrecy law. I tend to cautiously believe it, except the part about the attempted reversal of the deposit at a later stage. That seems bogus.” I thought Nicole would be satisfied with that.

“So why do you consider that an in de pen dent source of information?”

“Because it doesn’t have to come from Iran to be genuine. These events took place before, or immediately after, Ward had left Pakistan. What supports the credibility of these pieces of information is that we learned about bits of them from different and in de pen dent sources. Then there’s the attempted attack on me in Islamabad, when I was driven in an embassy car just outside the embassy’s compound. Benny hinted it was connected to my search for the Chameleon. I’ve got no way of proving it, but I can’t disprove it either.”

“The other source of information is the FBI fingerprints report we saw today, with the State Department’s photo that Maxwell confirmed to be of Herbert Goldman, formerly known as Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, who at a certain time assumed the identity of Albert Ward-and who is the Chameleon.” She seemed to get closer to my way of thinking.

“We don’t know if it was an NSA or an FBI work product,” I said.

“More likely a combined effort,” said Nicole.

“Right. But what ever it is, in some points it matches perfectly with the other sources we have.”

“Such as the existence of Department 81,” agreed Nicole. “I tend to give the NSA/FBI report a much higher degree of credibility,” I said.

“Why, because it’s one of our own?” Her blue eyes were full of skepticism. “Don’t fall into that pit. Always question the value and credibility of information.” She sounded like some of my instructors at the Mossad Academy, although she was by far more attractive.

“No,” I said. “Because of the fingerprint match. Remember, I lifted a set of prints from the Chameleon’s cup next to his hospital bed.” When I saw Nicole’s brows rise again, I quickly added, “I know I’m not a qualified lab technician and might accidentally have contaminated the evidence. But apparently I didn’t, because these prints matched the prints the Australian police later obtained independently. Now comes a U.S. intelligence agency, and, through means they don’t tell us, it obtains another set of prints that match the two previous sets of prints. You can’t get better than that.”

“I agree,” said Nicole. “Provided NSA got it from some files in Iran. If we can make a case for that, then I’m convinced.”