The Chameleon Conspiracy (10 page)

“Does that go for you and me too?”

He had talked himself into a corner. “You know that we go beyond that.”

“Benny, don’t play with me. I have to know whether the sleazeballs I was talking to in Islamabad knew who I really am. If
they double-crossed me and sold you the information, then they could sell it again to people who aren’t as nice as you are.”

“They didn’t double-cross you with me.” This time there was no grin.

“So, you got it from a third party? They told someone else, who told you.”

Benny lifted a hand in protest. “Please. This is beginning to sound like middle school gossip—who told whom what and when.
I’ll just tell you. We intercepted communications between Ahmed Khan and his handler in Tehran.”

My heart raced. “Tehran? He’s working for the Iranians?” “Apparently. He didn’t buy your story about the magazine. He was
certain you were working for the CIA. He checked in with Iran about you.”

“And the immediate result was an attempt to kidnap me in Islamabad. Did you intercept the Iranian response to Ahmed’s query?”

“Well, you know what they had to say about it, don’t you? They tried to kidnap you.”

“That tells me a lot,” I said. “That Ward’s disappearance is probably connected to the Iranian intelligence services.”

Benny nodded. “Nothing is coincidental with these people.”

“So what are your plans?”

He paused. “Our bank could use additional business from Iran.”

“And how do you encourage that?”

“Convince them that we are efficient, ask no unnecessary questions, and talk to no governments.”

“There are plenty of banks with those qualifications in Europe.”

“I know. But we have special persuasion techniques.”

“Let me guess—from the department of dirty tricks?” Benny smiled. “Dirty? That only refers to the people we target. I’m talking
about intelligence-gathering techniques.” He had the faintest sparkle in his eyes. He knew how serious all of this was and
what the implications of it were for me, but that was part of what made him who he was. I’m sure he’d never let his own amusement
put my safety or my goals in jeopardy, but this kind of banter had become an ingrained aspect of our relationship.

In fact, I knew all about Benny and his techniques. I could still remember that time when we were in the Academy and he’d
pretended to be a police officer and convinced a bank teller to let him take his seat behind the counter because a con man—
me!—was about to pass a bad check. That was years ago, of course, but my old friend hadn’t changed one iota.

“OK,” I said. “Let’s get back to the point at hand.”

“Fine by me,” said Benny. “OK. In a sense, we’re both looking for Ward.”

Now that was a surprise. “Ward? What does he have to do with Israel that would make him interesting to the Mossad?”

“You already had one disappointment, when you jumped on that guy in Australia, right?”

“I get it. I fucked up again on something else,” I said, a little testily.

Benny smiled. “Are you ready for this?” he asked. “We’re after him too. So we know that the guy in the Sydney hospital bed
isn’t Albert Ward. And he’s definitely not Herbert Goldman. We do, however, think he’s an Iranian agent.”

It was the bull’s-eye of a target I’d been aiming at since I got the case, but hadn’t yet had the proof to present conclusively.
It was stunning to hear Benny sound so sure about my hunch.

“Why are you interested in him? Just because he’s an Iranian agent? There are thousands of them.”

“Because he’s one of Iran’s treasure hunters. A person who brought millions of dollars to their slush-fund coffers.”

“Why is it your business?”

“When he steals money from American banks, it’s your problem, but when that money starts financing Palestinian and other terrorist
organizations, he becomes my problem too.”

“If you’re so sure it’s him and can support it with facts to convince the Australians, then let’s get him! He could still
be in the hospital in Sydney.”

“I wish. Immediately after you left, the Australian police received notification through Interpol about the FBI finger-print
comparison, and their conclusion was that your guy wasn’t Albert C. Ward III.”

“I think they were holding him on some local fraud charges,” I said.

“Yes, land-sale fraud. Of the three complainants who said Ward sold them somebody else’s land, not one is available to press
charges. Two of them vanished, and the third one quickly withdrew his complaint. The Australian authorities had no choice
but to dismiss the arrest warrant. So he walked into the sunset.”

“Just like that?” I asked in disbelief.

“No basis to hold him,” Benny said. He was right. The third witness had probably assessed his diminishing survival options
after hearing that the two others had gone missing.

I was fuming. “I can’t believe this bullshit,” I grumbled. Even if he wasn’t Ward, even if there hadn’t been local fraud charges,
they could have held him on immigration charges. He entered Australia with a false passport. What kind of idiots were running
the force there?

“They dropped the ball,” said Benny. He had had his time for rage and was merely calm. “By the time the Australian police
rushed to get a new warrant, the guy was released.”

I paused to rearrange my thoughts. It was too much of a revelation to digest immediately.

“Chameleon—that’s what I’ve been calling this guy in my head. And I was right.” I scanned through my trip to Pakistan, trying
to reread things with the knowledge I had just acquired. “So Khan’s agenda…He gave me those half-truths to get more money?”

Benny shook his head. “He did have an agenda, but not the one you think.” Benny—good friend, or not—had a way of being cryptic
that sometimes got on my nerves. It was as if he were Socrates, and I, one of his pupils. I wished he would get to the point
more quickly, but I knew damn well that wasn’t going to happen.

“What was it, then? It seemed pretty clear that his story about Al Taqwa trying to reverse the charge and get their money
back from Ward’s account was bogus,” I said.

“What made you think that? You’re right, by the way,” asked Benny.

“This is home turf for me. It’s just not the way banks work. They don’t put in a lot of effort to get a measly $2,000 back
three years later. Khan made it up because he thought I was losing interest.”

“Or,” said Benny, “he was trying to lure you to Iran, probably under instructions from Tehran. They told him they were sure
you were an American agent. And they were interested in your Ward investigation.”

“So if the guy in the hospital bed wasn’t Ward or Goldman, who is he? Who’s the Iranian agent?”

“We don’t know yet,” he admitted. “It’s not going to be
easy. Even the wife he married in Kentucky believed he was Ward.”

“I need to digest what you’ve just told me,” I said. “Anyway, it occurs to me one good thing has come out of this conversation.”

“What?”

“If you own Tempelhof Bank, can you tell me more about what kind of relationship McHanna has with it?” It wasn’t too late
to score some points at home by unveiling a money-laundering operation in New York.

“Who?”

“You mean you don’t know him?” Benny shook his head. “He was a manager at the South Dakota bank that the Chameleon conned.
Now he runs a financial-services company in New York, and I think he still is in contact with the Chameleon. I’ve got a piece
of information linking him, using an alias, to Tempelhof Bank.”

“Let me find out,” said Benny. “But aside from that, I think we can agree to cooperate in finding the Chameleon.”

“Helping you out is a decision made above my head.” “You never had to ask permission before.”

“That’s true. But working for you without getting my superiors’ consent is a violation of my oath.”

“Hey, I didn’t say work for me,” he said defensively. “I said work together.”

“Like I said, I need to get permission.”

“You’ll get it.” He sounded alarmingly sure of himself. “What are you saying? That you already made a request through the
proper channels?” His face confirmed that I was right. “Thanks for asking my opinion first,” I grumbled.

“Don’t give me that act, Dan. We both know that when we worked together the last couple of times, things worked out as they
should have.”

“You could have at least asked me.”

“I was protecting you,” he said. “An official request by the Mossad to the U.S. government to cooperate is standard procedure.
Talking to you first before asking your government would have complicated things. You’ve just confirmed that.”

I left it at that. “So what did my bosses have to say?” How odd that a foreign intelligence service would know about my forthcoming
instructions before me. But pressing him further was not going to be fruitful; it would only make him dig in his heels that
much more.

“We’re still waiting. American bureaucracy, you know.”

“Right. Well, let me see what my boss tells me. We’ve got a conference scheduled.”

Later that day, after Benny and I had parted, I got a call from the U.S. Embassy. “A cable came in for you.”

I was sure it was one of those routine memos circulated that the ever-helpful Esther kept sending me even when I was away.

“Can you deliver it to my hotel?” I had already taken off my shoes, stretched on the couch, and started reading the newspaper.
The last thing I wanted to do was head to the embassy.

“Sorry, no. This is classified material that cannot leave this room.”

Why would I get that sort of document? I was investigating money launderers and white-collar criminals. Communications about
them are sensitive, but not secret. They’re frequently called “sensitive but unclassified” (SBU), containing data that isn’t
related to national security, but where their disclosure to the public could cause damage. My curiosity exceeded my laziness.

“I’ll be right over.”

I left my hotel room and walked a few blocks to the embassy on 71 Hayarkon Street, right on Tel Aviv’s shoreline on the Mediterranean
Sea. I went directly to Pat, the secretary of COS—chief of station—CIA in Israel, who handed me an envelope. It contained
a one-page document. I began reading immediately:

Central Intelligence Agency

Directorate of Operations

Washington, DC 20505

Memorandum

To: Dan Gordon, OFARML/DOJ

CC: David Stone, OFARML/DOJ

From: Pamela H. Grace

Date: October 7, 2004

Priority: Urgent

Classification: Secret

Subject: TDY

The Department of Justice has put you on a TDY to a CIA-led special task force on terrorist financing. A plenary meeting and
briefing will be held for two days in France commencing on October 11, 2004. Travel arrangements have been made by the Tel
Aviv embassy. Please confirm attendance. The scheduled meeting, its location, and its topic, as well as this memo, must be
treated as secret.

An attached note informed me that I’d be met at the Paris airport by Matt Kilburn, an Agency representative. I returned
the cable to Pat and signed a receipt that I’d read its contents.
TDY
meant temporary duty assignment. I was being put on an interagency transfer for a specific intelligence assignment.

Help was on the way from an unlikely source. The CIA had seldom been helpful in my efforts to retrieve money fraudulently
obtained from criminal activities, which the U.S. government had to pursue under a federal statute. Usually the flow of information
was unidirectional: from me to them. Maybe it would change now and, with their help, I could get moving on the Chameleon’s
case. I was surprised, though, that I hadn’t received direct instructions from David or Bob telling me I was assigned to a
CIA task force.

I went to the embassy’s travel office on the second floor. Guy, a skinny staffer, gave me an envelope with an El Al ticket
to Paris, departing Ben Gurion Airport on October 10. I used the secure phone to call David Stone.

After the initial pleasantries, David got to the point. “Have you met your friend Benny yet?”

“Yes, I always meet him while I’m in Israel. He’s an old friend.”

“While you were still in Pakistan a request from the Mossad came through channels suggesting cooperation in discovering the
Chameleon.”

“Did they say what their interest is?”

“They just said that we had a mutual interest, but didn’t specify.”

“Benny told me yesterday about their request. Israel has no direct connection, but he still wants to cooperate with us.”

“What? Did he elaborate?” David sounded surprised.

“He told me that the Chameleon is an Iranian agent stealing money in the U.S. for a slush fund that finances terrorist organizations.
The Mossad intercepted communications between Tehran and someone working for them in Pakistan mentioning Ward’s names, and
also mine. So this guy, whoever he is, is on the Mossad’s radar as a terror financier. That made him a Mossad target.”

“Be careful, Dan,” said David in a fatherly tone. “One of these days questions could be raised. Just be careful.”

“I am,” I said. “I think my informal contact with the Mossad through Benny is invaluable for us. It has always been.”

“I’m sure of that. But for the sake of transparency, why don’t you make a written record of each of your meetings, and send
me a copy for the file.”

“David, would you have me fill out a report every time I meet up with a buddy? What is this, East Germany circa 1980?”

“Dan, don’t take it to an extreme. You aren’t meeting with your buddy. You’re meeting with a high-ranking executive of a foreign-intelligence
service. Although the Israelis are our close allies, still, any contact between a federal employee and foreign agents must
be reported. These are the rules. Besides, believe me, it’s also for your own good.” I knew he was right, of course, and in
the past, each time a meeting with Benny was more than just friendly and touched sensitive issues, I’d always written a memo
to the file.

I asked David about my TDY to the CIA. I didn’t even know whether the task force would be an internal CIA ad hoc group, or
a multiagency group that included representatives from other government agencies. The distinction was critical, because in
the latter case, each representative ranked equally with the others and took instructions from his or her own agency. However,
in an internal CIA working group, I’d be subject to their directives, and David would remain in the background.

“You won’t be working for me. It’s for the CIA, as in the previous cases.”

“You mean Eric Henderson again?” My tone must have revealed my reservations. Eric and I were never cuddle buddies; in fact
our relationship was sulfurous at best.

“No. There’s another guy, Casey Bauer. Try to be nice to him, for a change.”

“I’m always nice!”

David laughed.

I returned to my hotel. Benny called me a few minutes after I entered my room. “Hi Dan. Any news?”

I felt a bit uncomfortable. Benny was always one step ahead of me. Or was it more than one? For a moment it flashed through
my mind:
Good thing this guy is my friend, you sure wouldn’t want him as your enemy.

“Nothing yet,” I said. “But you know how the fucking bureaucracy works. Give them time.” I hadn’t yet heard what my new CIA
boss would have to say about cooperating with the Mossad. He might not be exactly thrilled about it.

Two days later, on a breezy morning with cloudy skies, I drove to Ben Gurion Airport just outside Tel Aviv, returned my rented
car, and boarded flight LY 324 to Charles de Gaulle International Airport in France, twenty miles north of Paris. We landed
at five thirty in the afternoon. A boyish, athletic-looking man in his early thirties approached me at the gate.

“Mr. Gordon?” I nodded. “I’m Matt Kilburn.”

“Please show me an ID,” I asked cordially, but firmly. He showed me his U.S. passport.

“OK,” I said. “Where do we go?”

“First, please give me your passports.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You’re getting a new one. I’m sending your old passport back to your office in New York by diplomatic pouch.” He handed me
a sealed envelope with a new U.S. passport and an Arizona driver’s license. Both carried my picture, with my new name, Anthony
P. Blackthorn. I gave him my official government employee’s passport and my personal passport, and walked with him through
immigration and customs. Within twenty minutes we were outside the terminal building in a Peugeot 607 driven by a young blonde
woman who couldn’t have been a day older than twenty-six.

“Hi,” she said as I sat in the back seat. “Welcome to Paris.”

“Glad to be here. Where are we going?”

“To a nice place, I can assure you.”

There was no point in asking any further questions. Having been a frequent visitor to France, I couldn’t help but notice that
we weren’t going to Paris. As we entered the A13 highway, the car turned north toward Rouen, instead of south.

Twenty minutes passed in complete silence while I looked at green fields and busy rush-hour traffic. I saw an Exit 14 sign
to Vernon and Giverny, and the car took the exit. I remembered the name Giverny. This village, in the gateway to Normandy,
was for many years the home of Claude Monet, the French Impressionist. We passed a bridge over the Seine and three miles later
we entered the village. Many tourists were walking in the streets, particularly on rue Claude Monet, where a simple sign directed
the visitors to Fondation Claude Monet, his home and garden. Approximately one hundred yards down the road, I saw the Musée
d’Art Américain Giverny.

I could no longer hold back. “Is that where we are going?” I asked. “To these museums?”

“I wish,” said the blonde female at the wheel. “But I’m sure you’ll have an opportunity to visit these places. They are nothing
short of magnificent.” She pointed to the Musée d’Art Américain as we passed it. “This museum presents American Impressionist
paint ers influenced by Claude Monet. I think they are affiliated with the Terra Museum, near Chicago.”

“So where are we going?” I asked again.

“To a small, nearby chateau.”

The car turned into a small village road, and ten minutes later I saw the castle. It was spectacular.

“This is it,” said the woman. “An eighteenth-century chateau.” The castle was surrounded by many acres of park, with a pond
and trees. The landscape seemed taken out of the paintings of Watteau, the French rococo artist.

She stopped our car at the circular driveway. I got out and entered the chateau. On the right, connected to a spacious foyer
on the ground floor, was a huge dining room with an ancient parquet floor and big windows looking out on the extensive
gardens. An adjacent room was a winter garden, full of flower-pots and soft-colored couches.

“Hello, Mr. Blackthorn,” said a prim, very proper sort of man in his early seventies. His white mustache was impeccably trimmed,
and his black jacket beautifully tailored. “I’m M. Bellamy, and I’ll be your host during the convention. Please let me show
you to your room.”

I followed him up the marble stairs to what Europeans call the first floor and into a large room that had an elegant mahogany
bed, night table, easy chair, and small desk. Another door led to a small bathroom. There were no telephones or television
in my room.

“If you need anything, please let me know,” he said in French-accented English. “Dinner will be served at eight o’clock.”

Nothing but envy crossed my mind when I saw the accommodations. That’s what happens when your agency has a generous, nonpublic
bud get. Compared to my office’s bud get that is cut every year, while the workload increases.…David never stopped reminding
me of that.

I went downstairs dressed casually for dinner. I opened the dining room door and was stunned. There were ten or twelve people
seated, all dressed up—jackets, ties, the works. I stood shameful in my jeans and sneakers. I quickly turned around and returned
to my room to change into my only blazer and white shirt, but I didn’t even have a presentable tie. During a dinner in Tel
Aviv I had stained the only one I’d packed. When I’d left the U.S. three weeks before for Pakistan, I’d brought nothing but
light and casual clothes suitable for a hot climate. However, they were obviously inappropriate for a fancy chateau in Europe
in October.

I seated myself at a table with a place card saying anthony p. blackthorn. Next to me, in a black evening dress, sat my blonde
female driver. Her place card said NICOLE A. BLAIR.

“Hi, Ms. Blair,” I said smiling. “Am I late for anything?”

“No. Call me Nicole. We’re just having dinner.” The setting was perfect.

A waiter came to our table and served us with
terrine maison
, a molded dish with smoothly ground meat and mushrooms. He poured Merlot into our crystal goblets.

A tall, distinguished-looking, gray-haired man in his mid-fifties rose from his chair, holding his wine goblet, while the
waiters were clearing the table. The staff that served us in the dining room and later on in the winter garden could never
have guessed that the attendees weren’t gathered to hear lectures about art, but rather were (most of them) agents of the
world’s largest spy agency.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Arnold Kyle, and I’m the chairman of this convention. Welcome to the annual
meeting of the Arizona Chapter of the American Association of Impressionist Art Lovers. Cheers!” The men and women around
the beautifully set tables raised their glasses and “cheered.”

“One house keeping notice before dinner. We start our day tomorrow at nine a.m. with a lecture on post-Monet French Impressionists
given by Dr. Louise Guillaume, a lecturer at the Institut Français. At ten thirty, after a short coffee break, we’ll have
a general meeting of our chapter to elect a new board and president. I know you consider these matters boring, but we must
go ahead with our agenda and approve a new bud get, so I ask all of you to attend. After lunch we will continue with our deliberations
concerning the future of our chapter. In the late afternoon we will tour the Fondation Monet and the Musée d’Art Américain
and return here for dinner. After dinner we will have a closed meeting to discuss the proposed merger of our chapter with
the California chapter.”

I was appreciative of the idea—a disguised meeting in the heartland of Impressionism. The legend was perfect. It effectively
masked the identities of a bunch of clean-shaven Americans in Europe. Bring one or two lecturers from town to talk about Monet,
display a welcome banner, and we were in business. The rest of the time spent behind closed doors would be dedicated to far
craftier, but less artistic, matters.

The main course was
gigot d’agneau rôti aux herbes gratin
dauphinois
, a roasted leg of lamb with herbs. For dessert we had
plateau de fromages
—a plate of French cheeses—and coffee. I skipped both.

I made small talk with Nicole. She was as much “Nicole” as I was “Anthony.” She was rather attractive and friendly, but I
had other things on my mind than getting friendlier, and I knew that the same went for her. So after a few drinks and non-revealing
conversations, we retired to our respective rooms.