The Chameleon Conspiracy dg-3

by Haggai Harmon

  The Chameleon Conspiracy

  ( Dan Gordon - 3 )

  Haggai Harmon

  Haggai Harmon

  The Chameleon Conspiracy

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sydney, Australia, August 17, 2004

  “I’m not Albert C. Ward III. My name is Herbert Goldman! There must be a mistake.” The man in the hospital bed was insistent.

  I was amused.

  “Look here,” he tried again, when he saw my knowing smile. “I’m a sick man. The doctors say I shouldn’t get overexcited. What you’re doing to me is murder, you’re killing me!” Seeing that I wouldn’t budge, he rolled his eyes. He was dressed in a hospital gown that bared his backside, and a feeding tube crawled under the top part. Looking at him, I almost felt sympathy. Albert C. Ward III could have been any other patient in the ward: a slight, almost unnoticeable middle-aged man, lying there now like a deflated balloon. But that was Ward’s greatest asset. Who’d be suspicious of a small man in his late forties, whose few remaining teeth weren’t in such great shape? He had thinning hair that he combed sideways, applying the “savings and loan” comb-over: saving on the side where it still grew, and loaning it to the side where hair was long gone.

  We had just met for the first time, but I knew who I was dealing with. Right there in his hospital bed, he might have seemed older than his years, and he might have seemed humble. Albert C. Ward III was humble; he wouldn’t confront or cross you on anything, unless you were an investor or a banker sitting on some money, while he was thirsty for cash. The problem was that he was always thirsty. To quench that thirst, Ward would become a human chameleon and change from nobody to somebody in a heartbeat-a sneaky little devil, who’d siphon money from banks and walk silently away while the banks collapsed into the receiving hands of federal regulators for being under-capitalized, while investors lamented the loss of their uninsured savings, and while American taxpayers picked up most of the bill. Yes, that was Ward’s expertise. He was a banker for a new era: he banked on people’s foolishness and greed. A con artist of epic proportions.

  Ward was the only patient in a small room at the internal-medicine department of Macquarie Street Hospital in Sydney, Australia. It was a public hospital in the city center, not far from my hotel. Ward could have been mistaken for the man behind the counter at the post office…the refrigerator repairman, maybe. But that’s not entirely fair to say. Those good people never made history. Albert C. Ward III did.

  One detail set Ward apart from the other patients in the hospital: a uniformed Australian policeman sat beside him, making sure that Ward wouldn’t vanish again. Ward lay there in a simple metal-frame hospital bed, its white paint chipping around the edges. The room was clean, almost sterile, but no one would linger unless they had to. The unbroken view of cement wall, the smell of antiseptic mixed with human urine, and the hollow eyes of patients for whom this would be the last stop ensured that.

  For Albert C. Ward III, it was definitely not the last stop. This was his usual route-feigning a critical illness, approaching death’s door when he felt the law closing in on him. The history Albert C. Ward III made wasn’t an achievement to be inscribed on his tombstone when the time came. He wouldn’t make the record books. But still, he was a champion of something. Otherwise, how could he have evaded law and justice for nearly two decades, not to mention evading me for longer than any other target I’d ever chased? Well, he had come close.

  The only available pictures of him, dating back to high school, were on my desk, at home, and even in my car. Ward was a wanted man. Everyone was after him, including the FBI and the Office of Asset Recovery and Money Laundering of the U.S. Department of Justice (with me their senior investigative attorney). All of my life-three years at the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, and the time spent earning my Israeli and American law degrees-had been leading up to this. As an investigative attorney at DOJ, I’d been finding the money launderers, the scammers, the con artists who made off with other people’s money and stashed it away in sunny, far-off places and brought it back to the United States. Sometimes I also brought home the perpetrators. We called them absconders, targets, or defendants; the tax havens of the world called them investors. Obviously there was an ongoing conflict between me, the asset hunter, and these exotically located asset protectors. A better word would be battle, or even war . Conflict is a laundered word for stiff-upper-lip delegates at the UN.

  We had long been at war with the money launderers and their guardians. And when you’re at war, you enlist the finest. As for whether I fit into that category, well, you could ask any of the people who dealt with me professionally-that is, if you could get into prison to find them. So although I had pity for the chameleon that was in Albert C. Ward III’s bed, I was still awed by how he had managed to pull it off. Not once, not twice, but eleven times. And those were only the cases in which the FBI had determined him to be the main suspect. Who knew how many others there had been?

  “Mr. Ward,” I said. “I’m quite impressed with your display. But would you kindly stop the drama and talk to me?” His resistance impelled me to try again.

  “Here you go again,” he sighed. “I’m not Ward, my name is Herbert Goldman.” I noticed a slight accent when he pronounced the word here.

  “I need to rest, I don’t feel too well. You’ll have to excuse me.” He closed his eyes and turned his face to the wall. I stood there for five more minutes until a nurse came in.

  “Please, you are disturbing our patient,” she said, in a tone reserved for intruders aged ten and younger. I had thought Albert C. Ward III was disturbing my patience.

  The policeman looked bored as he sat there apparently not listening. He never said a word.

  The cafeteria outside was just about to close for the day. There was only one other diner, a man with a protruding nose hair noisily slurping a soup that even from a distance smelled like my socks after two weeks of basic training in the desert. I was hungry, and meat loaf with potato pancakes seemed safe. But one bite was enough. The meat loaf was probably made of the ass of an ass, and the potato pancakes tasted as if they had been fried in castor oil and lightly seasoned with sawdust. The plate smelled of ammonia. I pushed the tray away. Even my voracious appetite had its limits. Anyway, it was time to write my report on my meeting with Ward. My boss, David Stone, the director of the Office of Asset Recovery and Money Laundering, was going to love it.

  Walking to my hotel, I thought about how long I had waited to face Ward, how long I had mentally prepared what I would say to him. But when the time had finally come, there had been no bombast, no fireworks. Just hollow emptiness. I wasn’t recognizing yet that the battle wasn’t over, it had just begun.

  It wasn’t just the anticlimax, I quickly realized. I was still disturbed by the meeting and didn’t quite know why. Something just wasn’t sitting well.

  I pulled out my cell phone and called Peter Maxwell, the curly-haired, easygoing Australian Federal Police agent assigned to help me. I decided not to share with him the tinge of doubt I had.

  “I think it’s him all right,” I told Peter. “Let’s wait for the U.S. Department of Justice to prepare the request for provisional arrest with a view toward extradition. Meanwhile, just make sure he doesn’t leave the hospital until the request arrives.”

  “He isn’t going anywhere, might,” said Peter.

  “What do you mean, might?” I asked in a startled voice. “He could still leave?”

  Peter, with his heavy Australian accent, had actually meant “mate.”

  “I mean, we’ve a court order for the next twelve days on local Australian fraud offenses. Until then, you’re safe, but the criminal division of the Just
ice Department better hurry.”

  “What did he do this time?” I asked.

  “Sold the same real-estate property to three different people,” said Maxwell, chuckling. “But the land wasn’t even his in the first place.”

  The next call was to David Stone in Washington, DC.

  “David, I just saw the Chameleon.”

  “Good. What’s the latest color?” David never was much for emotion. He could be elated, but he’d speak with the same tone of a voice as if I’d told him it was sunny outside.

  “Sick man, hospital bed. But David, it’s going to be harder this time for him to change it up. He gave me a show that unfortunately won’t be coming to a movie theater near you. The hot part is that the Australians have him on unrelated charges.”

  “We’re sure it’s him?”

  “Pretty sure. The guy I saw matches Ward on seven points. Some physical, some circumstantial.”

  “Only pretty sure?” asked David.

  I hesitated. “There are a few things that are still holding me back,” I said. “He’s been calling himself Herbert Goldman.”

  We talked over some procedural stuff, how the Australians would need to positively ID him before they’d extradite him.

  “But that crap’s not the problem,” I said. “The Australian police can verify our ID information. Anyway, I’m after the money, not the body.” I paused. “Any word on the U.S. request for his provisional arrest? We only have twelve days to get that provisional arrest request here.”

  He sighed. “Hold on. I need to take another call.”

  A few minutes later, David came back on the line and told me that the FBI had just received a memo from the Australian Federal Police that the suspect hadn’t been fingerprinted yet, because he was in the hospital.

  “They didn’t?” I said. “Well, I think I can solve that problem.”

  I waited until evening visiting hours to return. The corridor and the nurses’ station were empty, so it wasn’t hard to borrow a plastic bag and a doctor’s white coat from a nearby closet. Ward was sound asleep and snoring. A policewoman read a newspaper beside him. Nonchalantly, I slid one hand into the bag and, with my fingers protected by the plastic, picked up the empty water cup from his side table. With my other hand I peeled the bag off and over the cup, enclosing it in the bag without adding prints of my own, and walked away, returning the coat to its place. The policewoman didn’t even blink.

  Peter Maxwell was sitting at his desk, rubbing his eyes over a pile of papers, when I arrived. I held out the plastic bag. “Check the prints on the cup, and match it with the sample the FBI sent you. That’ll convince you.”

  “Dan, I’m already convinced, but it may not be enough for the court. There could be an argument that this fingerprint evidence was compromised.”

  “That’s not for the court,” I said. “It’s for law-enforcement purposes. I’m afraid if there’s any doubt about his identity, he’ll be let go even after the extradition request comes in. The prints on the cup will do for now.”

  After a pause, Peter agreed. I’d liked him from the moment we’d met. He was a tall, brown-eyed, well-built man in his midthirties. He was always smiling, willing to help, and never put bureaucratic obstacles where none were necessary. He also had that quirky, uniquely Australian sense of humor that can inject levity even into the most serious circumstances. So can I. During one of our conversations, somehow the subject of Jewish holidays came up. “Sounds mighty complicated, mate,” he said.

  I smiled. “Not really. It can be summed up easily: Our enemies tried to destroy us. They couldn’t. We survived. Let’s eat.”

  When I’d seen his toothy grin, I knew that he got it.

  Back to Albert C. Ward III, now claiming to be Herbert Goldman. He had all the reasons in the world to fight extradition to the United States. In fact, he had eleven good and solid reasons, each of them a case bundled neatly into an indictment. He was on the line for ninety-eight counts of bank fraud, money laundering, grand larceny, and more.

  We were all lucky that con men who thought they could outsmart the world usually made one mistake too many. Albert C. Ward III’s mistake was trying to scam someone who didn’t deserve it. It was, indirectly, how I’d finally found him. I know I should never trade luck for skill, but there are exceptions.

  Sheila Levi was forty-one, with no special attributes. She wasn’t very pretty, or rich, or smart. But she was a nice woman, and she’d had the misfortune to fall in love with Ward. Sheila had worked as a secretary in a small Sydney law firm and had never married. Ward had charmed her, wined and dined her, and soon moved in with her to the one-bedroom apartment she’d bought after years of saving every penny, taking a big mortgage.

  The rest of the story was sadly predictable, as I realized when she met me for lunch the day after my frustrating hospital interview with Ward. At his suggestion, she had taken a second mortgage on her apartment and given him the money to “invest in their future.” She’d given him the jewelry she’d inherited from her grandmother, which he sold immediately. But Sheila still had faith in him. Why?

  “I wanted so much to marry and have a family,” she said, sobbing, sitting opposite me in the dining room of my Sydney hotel. “He proposed marriage, and I believed him. My dream collapsed just a few hours before the wedding ceremony. How could I have known that he was already married?”

  I nodded sympathetically.

  “I know it makes me sound stupid, but I really loved him and believed what he told me. That’s where I went wrong. Now I don’t have him, and I don’t have my apartment. I couldn’t make the payments, and the bank foreclosed.”

  “Where do you live now?”

  “I share a rented room with a waitress I work with.”

  “A waitress?”

  “Yes,” she said faintly and apologetically, lowering her eyes. “I lost my job as well. My employers were sick of me being distracted, and the creditor phone calls got out of hand. I’m waitressing now in two different restaurants.” She dried her eyes. “Today is my day off.”

  I felt mounting rage. Cheating banks out of their money was bad enough, but cheating a trusting woman who’d had almost nothing to begin with and was then left with even less was appalling. But more than just that, something didn’t make sense. If Ward had scammed millions from U.S. banks and investors over the years, why was it worth his while to scam a secretary out of something as modest as her grandmother’s jewelry? Where had all that money gone?

  I flew back from Sydney to New York. After those three long days of travel, including a layover, I went to my office and read an e-mail from David that had just come in. Your report that you found Albert C. Ward III in Australia is apparently inaccurate. The FBI compared the finger-prints of Albert C. Ward III maintained in its database with prints lifted from the cup you gave the Australian Federal Police, and against subsequent prints obtained by the Australian police after you left. They told me an hour ago that the prints don’t match. The person you saw in the hospital bed is not Albert C. Ward III. The U.S. will not request his extradition. David.

  The triumph I’d felt on the flight from Sydney had turned out to be fleeting, and was immediately replaced with bitter disappointment. How could this have happened? I’d followed my hunch as well as procedure, and still failed. I’d lost the round, but I didn’t lose the lesson. I thought of a phrase from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I wasn’t ready to wear my failure like an albatross around my neck. How come when I managed to pull off a task, there was nobody around, but hey, when I failed, there were plenty of witnesses? When I fucked up an exercise during my Mossad training, my instructor had told me sarcastically, “You have to learn from the past experiences of others, although I’m sure you’ll find new ways to err.” It had hurt.

  I shut the office door and collapsed into my chair, trying to figure out what to do next. I was facing a brick wall. I’d tried to scale it and failed.

  Should I th
row in the towel? How long do you keep digging before you concede that the well is dry? Not here, buddy.

  My father had taught me that while a defeat is sometimes just a temporary setback, surrender makes it permanent. I wasn’t there yet, far from it. I was determined to win, but how? I would have to start again from the beginning.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Manhattan, New York, November 2003

  The sun wouldn’t shine that morning, and the skies would only lighten to pencil gray. Glancing at the glowing red digits of the clock, I could already feel it. It was six forty-five A.M., and only the slowly fading darkness told me it was already morning. When I finally got out of bed, I instantly regretted it. There had to be a better way to start the day than waking up in the morning.

  It was one of those days I dreaded. No pressing duties to perform at the office, just routine, snail-paced progress in the money-laundering cases I investigate for the U.S. Department of Justice. I forced myself not to return to bed, looking through the window at the cars passing through the Chelsea streets. New York City was unusually quiet. I felt strangely out of place. After twenty of years in the U.S., many of them right there in that apartment, I felt a pulling away. From the moment I’d landed in New York, I had considered it my home, and the U.S. my country and my future. But the dreary color outside made me long for the Israeli sun. Not the scorching rays of August that melt the asphalt, but the caressing sun of May and June that wraps you like the warmth of loving arms.

  Shaking myself out of memory lane, I went to the kitchen. I took a carton of orange juice from the half-empty refrigerator- extra pulp, the way I like it-and drank it directly from the spout, flooding my chin and neck with juice.

  Damn whoever designed that stupid spout, I thought.

  I wiped my chin, took a deep breath, and resigned myself to going to work. Con men absconding from the U.S. beware, I thought. I was cranky, and ready to take it out on whoever’s file happened to be on my desk that day.