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
