CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Used passports, known as books to us, the counterfeiters and smugglers who traded in them, had to be checked before they could be sold or used by black marketeers. It was always possible that the junkies, runaways, or indigent foreigners who'd sold their passports to our agents were wanted for some serious offence in their own or some other country. More than a few smugglers had been caught out in that way. They'd bought passports, changed them to suit, and set out on a mission, only to find themselves arrested at a foreign airport because the original owners were wanted for murder, or robbery, or different smuggling charges. To ensure the satisfaction of our customers and the safety of our couriers, Abdul Ghani subjected every new passport that he bought or stole to two levels of scrutiny.
A customs officer with access to a computer at Bombay's international airport provided the first filter. At a time and place of his choosing, the officer was given a sheet bearing the country of origin, passport number, and original name on each passport to be checked. A day or two later he returned the sheet with a line drawn through those that were flagged in his computer. Some of the passports were flagged because international arrest-warrants had been issued for the original owners. Some passports were flagged because suspicion attached itself to the owner: a hint of involvement in the illegal drugs or arms trade, or some political connection that made security services uneasy. Whatever the reason, flagged passports couldn't be sold on the black market or used by Ghani's couriers.
Flagged books still had their uses. It was possible to cannibalise them by pulling apart the stitching to furnish fresh pages for other, usable books. There were also other uses within India. Although foreigners had to show their passports for C-Form entries when they registered at hotels, every city had its share of places that weren't fastidiously precise about the resemblance, or lack of it, between a passport and its bearer. For those hotels, any passport did the job. Although unable to travel out of India with such a flagged passport, a man or woman could use one to move around within the country safely, and satisfy the minimum legal requirements that an obliging hotel manager had to observe.
Unflagged books that did pass the customs check were sent through a second filter at airline offices. All the major airlines kept their own lists of hot or flagged passports. Inclusion of a passport name and number on the list was prompted by anything from a bad credit rating or fraudulent dealings with an airline to any incident involving violent behaviour as a passenger on a plane. Naturally enough, when smugglers were going about the business of their crimes they were eager to avoid any but the most superficial and routine attention from airline staff, customs personnel, or police. A passport that was flagged, for any reason, was useless to them. Abdul Ghani's agents at the offices of most of the major airlines in Bombay checked the numbers and names of the passports we'd acquired, and reported those that were flagged. The clean books that passed through both filters-a little less than half of all those obtained-were sold, or used by Khader's couriers.
The clients who bought Ghani's illegal passports fell into three main categories. The first were economic refugees, people forced from their land by famine or driven to seek a better life in a new country. There were Turks wanting to work in Germany, Albanians wanting to work in Italy, Algerians wanting to work in France, and people from several Asian countries who wanted to work in Canada and the United States. A family, a group of families, and sometimes a whole village community pooled their meagre earnings to purchase one of Abdul's passports and send a favoured son to one of the promised lands. Once there, he worked to repay their loan and eventually buy new passports for other young men and women. The passports sold for anything between five and twenty-five thousand dollars. Khaderbhai's network issued about a hundred of those poverty passports every year, and his annual profit, after all the overheads, was more than a million dollars.
Political refugees made up the second category of clients. The upheavals that sent those people into exile were often violent.
They were victims of wars, and of conflicts based on community, religion, or ethnicity. Sometimes the upheaval was legislated: thousands of Hong Kong residents who weren't recognised as British citizens became potential clients, with the stroke of a pen, when Britain decided in 1984 to return its colonial possession to China in a thirteen year resolution of sovereignty. Around the world, at any one time, there were twenty million refugees living in camps and safe havens. Abdul Ghani's passport agents were never idle. A new book cost those people anywhere from ten to fifty thousand dollars.
The higher price was determined by the greater risks involved in smuggling _into war zones, and the greater demand to escape from them.
The third group of clients for Abdul's illegal books was criminals. Occasionally, those criminals were men like me- thieves, smugglers, contract killers-who needed a new identity to stay one step ahead of the police. For the most part, however, Abdul Ghani's special clients were the kind of men who were more likely to build and fill prisons than to serve time in them. They were dictators, military coup leaders, secret policemen, and bureaucrats from corrupt regimes forced to take flight when their crimes were uncovered or the regime fell. One Ugandan fugitive-a man I dealt with personally-had stolen more than a million dollars, allocated by international monetary agencies for essential service constructions, including a children's hospital.
The hospital was never built. Instead, the sick, injured, and dying children were transported to a remote camp and left to fend for themselves. At a meeting that I set up in Kinshasa, Zaire, the man paid me two hundred thousand dollars for two books-a perfect, unblemished Swiss passport, and a virgin, original Canadian passport-and travelled safely to Venezuela.
Abdul's agents in South America, Asia, and Africa established contact with embezzlers, torturers, mandarins, and martinets who'd supported fallen tyrannies. Dealing with them gave me more angry shame than anything else I ever did in Khaderbhai's service. In the young life I'd known as a free man, I was a dedicated writer of newspaper articles and pamphlets. I'd spent years researching and exposing the crimes and violations perpetrated by such men. I'd put my body on the line, supporting their victims in a hundred violent protest clashes with the police. And I still felt some of the old hatred and a choking sense of outrage when I dealt with them. But that life I'd known was gone. The revolutionary social activist had lost his ideals in heroin and crime. And I, too, was a wanted man. I, too, had a price on my head. I was a gangster, and I lived from one day to the next with only Khader's mafia council standing between me and prison torture.
So, I played my part in Ghani's network, helping mass-murderers to escape from the death sentences they'd passed on so many others and had finally earned from their countrymen in return.
But I didn't like it, and I didn't like them, and I let them know it. I drove them to the wall on every deal, taking a little solace from the rage I provoked in them. And they haggled infuriatingly, those human-rights abusers, self-righteously indignant about spending the money they'd gouged from people's mouths. But in the end, they all caved in and agreed to our terms. In the end, they paid well.
No-one else in Khaderbhai's network seemed to share my sense of outrage or my shame. There's probably no single group of citizens who are more cynical about politics and politicians than professional criminals. In their view, all politicians are ruthless and corrupt, and all political systems favour the powerful rich over the defenceless poor. And in time, and in a sense, I began to share their view because I knew the experience in which it was grounded. Prison had given us an intimate acquaintance with human-rights violations, and every day the courts confirmed what we'd learned about the law: the rich in any country, and any system, always got the best justice money could buy.