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.
