The Chameleon Conspiracy (17 page)

“Do they have alumni associations?”

“I found several links. They keep photos, yearbooks, and other material that will make our job less tedious than we think.
We’d still need to interview hundreds,” I said, but she had already accepted the task.

“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 Château Pétrus 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.”

“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.”

“If you think NSA will tell you that they hacked into an Iranian government database and downloaded the personnel file of
Farhadi, then good luck with this one. NSA didn’t even
confirm its own existence until a few years ago. You know what people used to say that
NSA
stood for—
no such agency
. If you believe that they’ll tell us about their means and methods of gathering specific information, then there’s a bridge
in Brooklyn I want to sell you.”

I was certain that NSA did talk about it with someone outside its walls of secrecy. Namely, the FISA—Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act—court, while they were seeking a court order approving the use of “electronic surveillance” against foreign
powers or their agents. I did have a hunch how NSA broke into the Iranian computers. Before the Islamic Revolution, some Iranian
government agencies had used tailor-made software written by American companies. They’d left a trap door to allow them to
service the computers from a remote location. Now, that concealed method of access could be used to hack into the computer
without leaving a trace.