“The Chameleon must still be around,” I said.
“The Chameleon?” asked Maxwell in surprise.
“Yes, that’s the name I gave him.” I went on to give him the limited scope of information about the Chameleon’s ties to Iran I was authorized by Holliday to divulge to the Australians. “I think that even while still in the U.S., the Chameleon panicked and was sure that the FBI was on to him. He needed to escape. Of course, if he’d asked to be returned to Tehran, they would have smuggled him back. But since he didn’t, and based on our interrogation of another suspect in the U.S., I think the Chameleon had decided on going in de pen dent, without telling the Iranians. He simply obtained a false passport under the name of Herbert Goldman, a thirteenth alias, and decided to go to Australia, hoping that the FBI wouldn’t trace him and that Tehran would ultimately forget about him. That by itself is a cause for concern for any intelligence service, because independents try to market the goods they have to anyone that will buy them—in this case, information about his previous employer.”
“We know about the Iranians’ reaction in these instances,” said Maxwell without elaborating.
“I’m sure the Chameleon obviously knew of the Iranian intelligence services’ policy to save on pension payments to self-declared retirees, by moving to entitle their families to some death benefits instead. We suspect he went in de pen dent in Australia, because he called a contact in New York seeking a passport and money. The man who’d conned millions out of banks and investors remained penniless. He had to resort to petty crime and defrauded Sheila Levi, that poor secretary he’d promised to marry. He hinted to his New York contact that the FBI may have received information from the Australian Federal Police that had traced him in Australia.”
“It could be just disinformation the Chameleon was giving that person in New York, probably to obtain his cooperation,” said Maxwell dismissively.
“You are right,” I answered. I couldn’t tell Maxwell that McHanna had a direct interest in keeping the Chameleon quiet. Temporarily or permanently.
I felt tired. The twenty-four-hour travel between the U.S. and Australia had taken it’s toll on me. I returned to my hotel. When I woke up there was a coded message from Hodson on my laptop.
The following is additional information obtained from McHanna during his interrogation; be aware that it has not been corroborated. McHanna alleged that the Chameleon had told him during the telephone conversation that was earlier disclosed to you, that he (the Chameleon) had a lot of money hidden in Switzerland, probably a commission he paid himself each time he stole on behalf of the Iranians. McHanna also said that the Chameleon couldn’t get to his money, because it was kept in cash in safe-deposit boxes in Switzerland. That made wiring the money impossible.
That’s very interesting, I thought. McHanna lied to me regarding the wire transfer to the Chameleon and now he tells the FBI that the Chameleon has a safe-deposit box in Switzerland? That wasn’t earth-shattering news. The Chameleon had to keep his money somewhere. For me, the things that the Chameleon didn’t say in that connection were far more interesting. My conclusion from McHanna’s statement was that the Chameleon was totally dependent on him. I was sure that McHanna couldn’t risk the Chameleon talking. That would endanger McHanna’s freedom if the FBI found out what he did, or his life, if the Iranians discovered he’d betrayed them and killed their agent. No, I concluded. McHanna doesn’t want us to find the Chameleon alive.
I called Peter Maxwell and discussed my conclusion with him. “Can you get your people in the street to listen to vibrations? I think the Chameleon’s life is in danger.”
“We already have all our intelligence sniffers on the alert,” he said.
I sent Hodson a coded message.
I have a problem with McHanna’s story. Did he really have that conversation with the Chameleon? And if he did talk to him, did the Chameleon request help? If so, did he give McHanna his location? How was McHanna supposed to send money or a passport without an address? The Chameleon obviously knew that McHanna also worked for the Iranians. Wasn’t he afraid that McHanna would turn him in?
A few hours later I received Hodson’s coded answer.
We asked him these questions. McHanna said the Chameleon threatened him that if he went down, he’d take McHanna with him. Apparently the Chameleon knew about the private nest McHanna was building for himself using the Iranians’ money. But we don’t know if the call actually happened.
I sent Hodson another coded message.
Please interrogate McHanna regarding an attempt on the Chameleon’s life. My suspicion is that if the Chameleon betrayed the Iranians and killed Nazeri, he’d have no qualms in betraying McHanna. Therefore, I think McHanna would have him killed before we could get to him. McHanna’s giving us the Chameleon’s telephone number was probably meant to be used as a future alibi. If accused of arranging the Chameleon’s assassination, he could deny it by asking why would he give us a clue where the Chameleon was hiding, if he wanted him dead rather than alive and talking?
One minute later, I received another coded message written and sent before my last message to Hodson went out.
Dan, we have another development. McHanna has confessed to ordering Ms. Otis clipped. He said that Otis was married to the Chameleon and he may have told her something damaging. McHanna confessed that he knew that she had already exposed the Chameleon as Ward and Goldman to the Sydney rabbi. That was enough, even if she didn’t know about the Chameleon’s Whitney-Davis identity or the Chameleon’s covert activities and his real name. If the Chameleon were apprehended, then the shit would hit the fan and the way to McHanna would be short. The Chameleon’s identity exposure was not just a matter between the rabbi in Australia and Loretta Otis in the United States, two private individuals. McHanna told us that the Chameleon called months ago telling him that his identity as Goldman was blown. No further security infraction was necessary to convince anyone in the loop that Otis had to be eliminated.
So Hodson had reached the same conclusion as I had. The Chameleon’s life was short unless we got to him first.
I deleted the messages.
I went to meet Peter Maxwell. He came with a tall, slim, blonde woman in her midtwenties. “This is Gilian Caldwell. She’s a member of my team.” We shook hands. “Tell him,” urged Peter.
“There’s word on the street that anyone identifying Norman McAllister could make $1,000,” said Gilian.
“Any credence?” I asked.
“Yes, pretty much. We spread that rumor.” She chuckled. “A petty thief came forward and told us that Mr. McAllister has bought stolen jewelry from him for $150.”
“The same jewelry the Chameleon tried to sell to the jewelry shop?”
“Probably. The thief became scared when he heard there was a bounty on McAllister’s head. He told us he was afraid of getting accused or involved in this matter. He was out of his league.”
“Of course the $1,000 reward was also a consideration,” said Maxwell.
“Did he tell you where to find McAllister?” I asked. Peter’s phone vibrated. “Maxwell,” he answered. He listened for a minute and told us in a hurried voice, “Let’s go, a contact has been made.”
When Gilian heard the address from Maxwell she said coolly, “That’s the same address the petty thief gave us.”
We jumped into their unmarked police car and Maxwell drove us to Bondi Junction, an eastern suburb of Sydney four miles east of the Sydney central business district. When we arrived, the area was buzzing with police activity. A uniformed officer approached Peter. “Sir, there’s a person who has barricaded himself on the second floor of the house.” He pointed his hand toward a two-story apartment building.
“Any demands?”
“No. We think he was probably held hostage, but his captors escaped when we arrived. The neighbors called us when they heard screams coming out of the house.”
“If the captors left, why is the person barricading himself?” asked Pe
ter, and my hope that we were going to find the Chameleon died. This didn’t seem to be related to our case, so I just stood there letting Peter and Gilian do their job.
A few minutes later Peter came over to me. “We think the Chameleon is inside the house. A next-door neighbor gave us a description that meets the Chameleon’s physical description. We need to convince him that we are the police and that he can leave safely.”
“Is he armed?” I asked, wondering why the police didn’t storm the house.
“No, but he shouted that he’s holding a can of benzene and a lighter. He promised to burn anyone getting close. We want to resolve this without anyone getting hurt.”
A policeman came over. “Mr. Maxwell?”
Peter turned to him. “We have a visual from another building. We can see that he’s holding a tin can that is normally used to store petrol, but we don’t know if it’s full or not. His face seems burned or injured. His demeanor seems as if he is badly shaken; his hands are trembling and his speech is blurred. He could be deranged.”
“For how long did the neighbors hear the screaming?”
“A whole night. At the beginning they thought it was just a domestic quarrel, but then realized they were screams of pain, so they called the police.”
“Maybe someone was torturing him,” I suggested, and Peter didn’t seem to reject the idea.
“There’s a crisis-management psychologist on the way,” he said. “Maybe he can talk him out of it.”
The next thing I saw and then heard was the sound of a bullet, followed by a fiery explosion that shattered windows in our vicinity, then sent a shock wave. A black cloud of smoke emerged from the house where the Chameleon had barricaded himself.
“Shit,” said Maxwell, expressing my thoughts as well. Police forces rushed into the building together with firemen and medics. I stayed behind. I knew already what they’d discover when they entered the house. The Chameleon had perished.
Maxwell joined me twenty minutes later. “The petrol tank held by the Chameleon was directly hit by a bullet and exploded. The Chameleon died instantly.”
McHanna or the Iranians got him first, I thought. That means that the Australians have an Atashbon of their own.
After hearing more details from Maxwell, I returned to my hotel.
As I took off my clothes, I smelled the smoke, although I was standing two hundred feet away. I sent a message to Hodson, Casey, and Holliday reporting the Chameleon’s demise. Then I crashed.
When I woke up I received a one sentence response. “Return home.”
On the plane ride home, I was thinking what Goldilocks once said referring to that bowl of porridge: This is just right. After thumbing his nose at the law for so long, pay time for the Chameleon had come.
After getting over the jet lag, I went to see Hodson. Holliday and Casey were there as well.
“Did McHanna say anything about the Chameleon’s death?” I asked.
Hodson smiled. “We forgot to tell him. Instead, we suggested that the Chameleon was arrested and was cooperating, putting all the blame on McHanna.”
“And what was McHanna’s reaction?” I asked in an amused tone.
“He threw everything back at the Chameleon and, in fact, filled in all the missing blanks.”
“Didn’t he suspect that you were pulling an interrogation trick on him? After all, he’s a sly fox.”
“We thought of that. But when we gave him details of where the Chameleon was hiding, he was convinced that we got him,” said Casey.
“Does he know the truth now?” I was curious.
“Yes. Under the same plea we reached earlier, he confessed to sending a hit man to kill the Chameleon. He will be locked up forever.”
“Was terminating the Chameleon McHanna’s idea or Iran’s order?”
“McHanna says Iran told him. Obviously we can’t ask Tehran for comment. That leaves us with McHanna to face murder charges. As a lawyer, you know it makes no difference if he had him killed under orders from Tehran or on his own initiative. It’s still murder,” concluded Casey.
“It’s all over but for the shouting,” Hodson said. “Iran’s most dangerous spy ring operating in the U.S. has been eliminated.”
“Are you sure?” I insisted. I had the clear impression that Bauer, Hodson, and maybe even Holliday were looking to wind it down. But I still had unanswered questions.
“I am.”
“Well, I’m not. If I were you I wouldn’t ring the gong. I think we should continue digging. There were about eighteen members of Atashbon, and we’ve accounted for only eleven.”
“We have accounted for all of them,” Hodson said, beginning to lose his patience. He looked at Holliday and Casey, who shrugged their shoulders.
“That’s Dan Gordon,” said Bob Holliday. “You have to take him the way he is.”
Hodson smiled. “You may not know this, but Dan and I have worked together before. I’ve had enough ‘Dan hours’ to teach me that he’s relentless and cannot be stopped.”
Holliday said in an amused tone, “My predecessor, David Stone, called him a pit bull who never lets go.”
“I’m blushing,” I said. “Stop.” But in my heart I hoped they wouldn’t. Admissions of imperfection? Not right now, and not from yours truly.
“I have to admit I was wrong,” I said suddenly in a futile effort to improve off my image.
“That’s a first,” said Casey. “Enlighten us.”
“I labeled him a chameleon because he caught his prey with his tongue and changed his skin each time he changed location. But apparently in nature, chameleons don’t change their color to blend in with their environment. In fact, they mostly change their color when faced with imminent danger, or when their mood changes.”
So the lid was finally put on the Chameleon and his comrades, although belatedly, I thought as I walked out the door. The forces of karma might have a good sense of justice, maybe even a sense of humor, but certainly a bad sense of timing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I inherited the love of writing from my father, Yehiel Carmon. Like me, he had a “day job” and a “night job.” During the day, he was a stern CEO of an Israeli bank. But come evening, he was sequestered in his library, which had a huge collection of books squeezed on wall-to-wall shelves. There, he was glued to his noisy typewriter typing books and articles with two fingers. His library was his shelter from the high-pressure banking world, and there he immersed himself in the mysteries of Far East philosophies and Jewish wisdom. Little wonder that when I turned thirteen, my father’s gift was his first published book, The Decanter and the Goblet.
My intelligence thrillers were inspired by my Israeli professional background, as well as by my twenty years of service for the United States government. Like my father before me, I also had a publicly known “daytime” activity as well as a “nighttime” covert activity. Since 1985 I have been representing the United States government in its Israeli civil litigation, appearing in Israeli courts in lawsuits to which the U.S. is a party. But away from the public eye, I was also engaged by the U.S. government to perform intelligence gathering in multimillion-dollar white-collar crime cases that required sensitive undercover work in more than thirty countries. Obviously, in my years working for the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies, I could not share the hair-raising aspects of my work with anyone but my supervisors, and some adventures not even with them. Sadly, these events, which are sometimes more fascinating and breathtaking than the best fiction I have ever read, will never see the light of day. The story of Dan Gordon and his battle against the invisible FOE—forces of evil—is my idea of the next-best thing.
The Chameleon Conspiracy is the third installment in the Dan Gordon Intelligence Thriller series, preceded by Triple Identity and The Red Syndrome. More thrillers in the series are to follow. In my professional life, first in Israel and then working for the United States government, I have had enough adventures, frequently dangerous, to fill at least
ten books, and those are just the ones I can talk about. The others I can’t even fictionalize.
Many friends and family members helped me with this novel, to avoid pitfalls that loom when fiction and reality intertwine. Although The Chameleon Conspiracy was inspired by my work, it is not an autobiography, but rather a work of fiction brought closer to reality with every passing day. Apart from historical events, all names, characters, personal history, and events described in this book have never existed.
Many of my friends, after reading the barrage of my literary-related announcements and realizing I wrote four books in several years, asked me whether I switched careers again. My answer is always the same: my love for law and my passion for writing intelligence thrillers exist side by side. My novels, though fictional, carry a real-life message: read the writing on the wall! Terror, terrorists, and their state sponsors threaten the Free World and must be stopped. Unless we learn from the mistakes of others, we are doomed to repeat them.
Sarah McKee, former Justice Department general counsel of Interpol’s U.S. Central Bureau, read the manuscript and helped me avoid pitfalls while describing Interpol’s work. She also made suggestions based on her distinguished career as a federal prosecutor prior to her top role at Interpol. I am grateful for the special efforts she made, and for her unfailing grace and professionalism. My former supervisor and mentor, David Epstein, is now retired, but in eighteen years of guidance he helped achieve that which inspired my novels, and I am forever grateful to him for that.
The Chameleon Conspiracy Page 38
