Triple Identity
( Dan Gordon - 1 )
Haggai Carmon
Haggai Carmon
Triple Identity
One afternoon in 1993, in a windowless conference room in Washington, D.C., a tall visitor opened a powerful laptop and turned it to face a closed session of an interagency committee of senior investigative agents and lawyers from a dozen government offices. Everyone sitting in that room investigated major multinational crimes or managed other substantial international cases on behalf of the United States. All of us were concerned with recovering profits of crime or to win redress for victims of civil wrongs. Our successes, whether generally unknown or splashed across the media, were matters of public record. We of course relied for them on an array of law enforcement investigative tools and governmental mechanisms for international cooperation. But as he clicked on screen after screen Haggai Carmon, an international lawyer in private practice, surprised those of us meeting him for the first time with true tales of how, as a consultant to the U. S. government, his independent approaches had ferreted out millions in U.S. crime profits that perpetrators had cached abroad. In this work Haggai had also gathered legal intelligence in more than thirty countries that proved to be at least significant and sometimes crucial to civil and criminal cases, money laundering cases in particular, involving the U.S. government. The methods Haggai outlined were original, effective, and unusually swift. Some made creative use of that slim computer of his. All were perfectly legal. Whether retained to work in tandem with government investigators or operating independently for the government, Haggai had in numerous major cases been responsible not only for tracking down ill-gotten assets abroad but for facilitating their return to the United States. Nearly a decade later, Haggai surprised me again. By then I'd retired from my Department of Justice job as general counsel for the INTERPOL-U.S. National Central Bureau, slipping gratefully off to a quieter life. But Haggai had another true tale, and he tracked me down to tell it. During sleepless, jet-lagged nights in remote hotels, he'd pounded out an international legal/spy thriller based on his years as a money hunter in more than thirty countries. Would I look at Triple Identity 's discussions of INTERPOL to see that they were authentic? I agreed to check relevant sections. When the bulky manuscript arrived, however, I glanced at its first page, the first sentence – and read straight through to the very last word. Parts of the book sprang, it was obvious, from pure imagination. Triple Identity 's David Stone, mythical head of a nonexistent U.S. Department of Justice office, has “an ample budget.” This does not happen. Given their heavy and ever-increasing caseloads, no government international office I've known, regardless of country, has had a budget that its agents or lawyers would call “ample.” Nice thought! But it's fiction. Nor would any government lawyer resort to a certain few of the ploys used by unbureaucratic Dan Gordon, the book's dual-nationality Department of Justice lawyer and a veteran of the Mossad. No government lawyer who tried them could keep job, law license, or, in the worst case, liberty. You'll spot these certain ploys. They're clever. They're highly entertaining. They're even plausible. In real life, though, they don't happen. But what about that twisting plot, those interlaced subplots, incident after curious incident? What about much more than ninety million dollars spirited from a California bank? What about the fugitive banker, real identity as elusive as he, who spirited these millions away? What of that multinational cast of bad, good, and in-between guys crisscrossing Europe and the Middle East, double-crossing one another, intent on seizing the money, stalking the man, securing materials to manufacture weapons of mass destruction? Did these spring from Haggai's cases? From cases that others handled? From Haggai's innovative and inventive mind? Haggai says that they're fiction. He certainly should know. So, fiction they are. But as far as my experience goes, they nonetheless ring true. I'd say that they could have happened.
The white, masklike face wore an inquisitive expression, as if, when final darkness came, Raymond DeLouise had asked, “What happened?” then, “Who are you?” and finally, “I should have…”The entry wound on his forehead was barely noticeable but for the round gunpowder-burn marks from a close-range shot.
I identified him by comparing the passport picture I held of Raymond DeLouise with the corpse's face. I'd found the man I was looking for.
“That's what killed him,” said the man in the white gown and clear plastic gloves, pointing at the tiny wound. I wanted to leave. The metallic click of refrigerated drawers and the cold glare of fluorescent lights sent chills down my spine. I was also uncomfortable with the harsh-sounding German words that, though attempting to be courteous, sounded almost sadistically gleeful. Duty or not, feeling sick to my stomach was not in my job description.
It wasn't the corpse. I had seen many before, including the poor souls I personally sent to their just rewards. But back then it was during battle, when it's your life or theirs, or – during discretionary warfare, sometimes also called “black operations,” in which there are no rules, no records, no attribution – when it was only their lives.
What nauseated me was the smell of formaldehyde mixed with cleansing detergents: the stench of death. The odor seeps under doors, along hallways; it sticks to your clothes, infiltrates your nostrils, convulses your stomach.
This was my first visit to a morgue, and its deep-chill atmosphere put death in a different perspective. DeLouise was not my enemy, only my target, and we were not at war. At least I thought so then.
In a hurry I left the morgue, located in the Munich City Hospital on Ismaninger Street, trying to mask my revulsion, and stepped out into the crisp October day. There were some leaves on the tall trees; autumn was still very much in the air. I looked at the clear sky, at the passing faceless people, at the cars, and took a deep breath. This case was certainly different from all the other cases I had investigated for the U.S. Department of Justice. This time an asset-recovery case involved more than money; it involved blood. Someone had killed DeLouise, execution style. It wasn't an accident. “He didn't die of measles,” as they say in the intelligence community. You just don't walk the streets of Munich and get shot in the head. It wasn't a stray bullet that killed him either; DeLouise was the target. Raymond DeLouise, or rather his assets, were also my target, and now he was dead. New rules had been written.
I went to the parking lot outside the morgue and headed for my car. It was a shiny blue BMW, rented for me by Helga from the legal attache's temporary office at the U.S. Consulate in Munich. I paused just as I was about to insert the key in the lock. I felt a sudden rush of adrenaline. I began to sweat even though the air was chilly. I needed to pull myself back to reality.
I stood for a moment, took a deep, long breath, and got into the car. I was being ridiculous. As a trained professional I knew that it took more than the twenty minutes I had spent in the morgue to booby trap a car parked in an open lot, in full view, without arousing suspicion. Besides, the assassin had to be a professional hitman, not a serial killer randomly selecting his next victim. The only people who knew about my pursuit of Raymond DeLouise and my efforts to seize his assets were the U.S. Department of Justice and the Mossad, Israel's foreign-intelligence service – my current and former employers, respectively. And neither eliminated people in the dirty-money business that way; they simply made the wrongdoers read their service and procedures manuals. That was ample punishment.
I tentatively turned the key in the ignition. No surprises. The engine roared to life and I drove off.
Though still on high alert I calmed down somewhat, scanning the streets as I drove. As I pulled up at a stoplight, I took a brief but thorough look at a couple of types in a blue Mercedes parked across the street. They were staring at me. Something
about their appearance made me suspect they were not a natural part of the landscape. Military-type men, somber looking – are they on assignment? A scene from a black-and-white Hollywood movie ran fast-forward before my eyes. Soon one dark-skinned guy sitting in the car would jump out in front of me with a gun, shout something in an indistinct language, and start spraying the area with bullets. I'd run for cover, pull out the . 22-caliber Beretta, aim with both hands (true to my Mossad training), and unload the entire clip into his head, watching as he collapsed in slow motion.
I smiled at the thought, culled from the many detective stories I'd read in my teenage years in Israel. These men were probably Turkish or Albanian gastarbeiter, guest workers, waiting for a friend to return from a visit to the nearby hospital. Besides, I was not armed.
The light turned green. I sped away.
Fantasy intrigues many people, because a mere glimpse into the world beyond the horizon changes everything, taking one into a wild twilight zone. As for myself, I need reality. It makes me strong and confident.
I was beginning to like the new challenge of this case. It would be a refreshing change from the routine of tracing crooks through endless reviews of paper trails, bank statements, and the smell of spilled coffee on documents and files retrieved through subterfuge and deception. Even the “social engineering,” the current politically correct phrase for befriending a target to elicit information, would have to happen on a different level. This time the action was in the present tense. In all my other Department of Justice cases during my ten-year service as an investigative attorney, I was called in after the fact, after the crook had taken off with the money, after the money had been laundered, after the best lawyers and accountants money can buy had buried the money so deep in a warren of offshore trusts and shell companies that it would take an expert miner to dig it out. I was one of those expert miners, not a homicide detective. My target's sudden murder put my asset-recovery investigation into a whole new league. I wasn't complaining, though. I had to report my findings to David Stone, my boss at the U.S. Department of Justice, and thought it would be best to do it from the American Consulate through a secure phone. Clearly, murder made the case far more than a hunt for money.
But first I drove back to my hotel. I needed a shower to wash off the smell of the morgue. I also wanted to get some sense of whether the homicide was relevant to my assignment before getting a taste of the bureaucracy at the consulate.
Half an hour later, feeling a lot cleaner and wearing a standard soft hotel bathrobe, I opened my room safe and put in the documents Stone had given me two weeks ago. There was the usual stuff, all of which fell under the category of “Unclassified, but Sensitive” documents: the fact sheet on DeLouise containing his photo, bio, and vital statistics; a copy of his California driver's license, and the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, report. Nothing classified for national security purposes, but documents that could still damage our case if they fell into the wrong hands.
I dressed and started to leave my room but changed my mind. I felt as if I'd walked in on the middle of an action movie. Events were taking place quickly, and I was trying to catch up. In such a case, caution was never a bad policy.
I took an airline magazine from the coffee table and found an article describing the art treasures of the Orient. I highlighted several paragraphs at random with a yellow marker, took the DeLouise file from the safe, and locked up the magazine instead. I snapped a hair from my head, wet my finger with my saliva, and placed the hair carefully over the wooden door hiding the safe. When I returned, I would be able to tell immediately whether someone had tried to open the safe. Even if the safe were opened, the highlighted article in the magazine would be a puzzle for anyone trying to check out my papers. Alex, my Mossad Academy team instructor, had taught me that “Not only must you maintain combat-zone security during operations but also leave ‘land mines’ behind.” The highlighted portion of the magazine would lead any snooper to wonder what was so important in a magazine article that it had to be locked behind a steel door.
Hotel-room safes are simple to open. Many guests forget the pass code or check out leaving the safe empty but locked, so hotel managements have had to devise ways to open them. All hotel security officers have a small wrench with which they remove the front panel of the electronic lock. You can do it in a minute if you know how. Obviously, such a wrench is readily obtained. With Alex's warning permanently imprinted in my mind, I never deposited anything valuable in a hotel-room safe. A hotel vault is much more reliable, because two separate keys are required: the guest keeps one, the hotel the other. Nevertheless, we were instructed in the Mossad to use a hotel central safe only for documents deemed to be at a “limited” confidentiality level, two grades of confidentiality below “Secret.” Combatants, the term used for Mossad officers working outside Israel, store all other documents at the local Israeli Embassy's vaults.
I no longer worked for the Mossad, but old habits are hard to break. Apparently, this sort of thing becomes second nature after a while.
Alex had repeatedly indicated that we must adhere to safety and security procedures at all times. “In the field,” his favorite term, meaning anywhere beyond our desks, “always look around you, physically and mentally. If you're not working alone, keep eye contact with your team; either hang together or be hanged together. You never know where the blow will come from. It's the guy you don't see who'll shoot you down.”
Seeing DeLouise's body stretched out on a morgue slab had sharpened my senses. If I found that the strand of hair had been moved, I'd go into combat-level security for everything.
I took my file folder, went to the lobby, and deposited the folder in the hotel safe.
I drove through the bustling traffic of Munich to the American Consulate. Security around the building was very tight. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait several weeks earlier and the world was tense. The United States had increased security around all its embassies and consulates, no matter how friendly the host country. Concrete barriers blocked one lane of the street to keep traffic from getting too close to the building. The terrible U.S. Embassy suicide car bombing in Beirut in 1983 that killed sixty-three people – seventeen of whom were Americans and eight of whom worked for the CIA – was still a vivid memory.
German policemen wearing bulletproof vests and holding German shepherds on short leashes were everywhere. I waited patiently at the end of the long line to enter the consulate. I passed through a metal detector and went to the reception booth. A Marine was sitting behind one-inch-thick bulletproof glass.
“I'm here to see the legat,” I said showing him my Justice Department ID.
“Hold on, sir,” he said, and picked up the phone. He handed me a visitor's badge and buzzed the heavy glass door separating the entry hall from the lobby.
“Mr. Lovejoy's office is on the third floor, sir, and the elevator is just past the lobby.”
“Thanks,” I said, and went inside.
A tall, rosy-cheeked blond woman in her midtwenties met me as I exited the elevator on the third floor. She wore an American Consulate photo ID around her neck.
“Hello, I'm Helga, Mr. Lovejoy's secretary,” she said in a friendly voice, with a trace of a German accent.
“I know that.”
“How do you know?” She was puzzled. “We've never met, have we?”
“No,” I said, smiling, “I just read it on your badge.”
She laughed as I followed her down the hall.
“Mr. Lovejoy is out of his office at the moment,” said Helga as we walked, “but he is in the building and I expect him back soon.”
“Good,” I said. “Is there an office I could use until Mr. Lovejoy returns?”
Helga showed me into a small conference room with a round table in the center and five chairs. A single telephone was on the table.
“How do you get an outside line?” I asked as I sat down.
“Simply dial 9, but if you want to call
the United States, you'll have to call me first to punch in the code. Here, let me do it for you now.” She leaned over my shoulder, brushing her full breasts against me, punched a few numbers, and left the room. A subtle, flowery scent remained in the air.
I called Stone at his Justice Department office in D.C.
I liked working for David. He looked like the classic absentminded professor, but the mind was right there and it was shrewd. Always clad in outdated suits and loose ties, David was a Justice Department veteran. During his thirty years of service he had gained a reputation as a clever lawyer with outstanding integrity and professionalism. After ten years as the head of foreign litigation for the United States, he'd been promoted to director of the Office of International Asset Recovery and Money Laundering. There he had an ample budget, fifteen staff lawyers, and a free hand to recover internationally located funds, fruits of money laundering or bank and insurance fraud. In most of David's cases, the amount to be recovered exceeded ten million dollars. In at least six or eight cases a year, it topped one hundred million. DeLouise's case deserved special attention; the amount I was expected to retrieve for the U. S government was significant and DeLouise had brought about the collapse of a bank.
The phone clicked at the other end. “I found Raymond DeLouise.”
“Great,” said David. “Where is he?”
“In Munich.” Before David could comment, I added, “In the city morgue. He's been on a cold slab for several days.”
There was a pause. I could almost hear David's mind at work, analyzing the facts.
“How did he die?”
“A bullet to the head is detrimental to anyone's health,” I said dryly.
“How did you find him?” he asked.
“It's complicated. Triple identity,” I said. “It seems that there was more to DeLouise than met the eye.”
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