I shook my head. I’d been stationed in Beirut for a while. I had known a few people who had gone out to the Bekaa Valley for one reason or another. Not too many of them had come back.
`Syrian-controlled Lebanon,’ Kelstein said. `Joe called it the badlands. They do everything there. Training camps for the world’s terrorists, drug processing laboratories, you name it, they’ve got it. Including a pretty good replica of our own Bureau of Printing and Engraving.’
I thought about it. Thought about my time there.
`Protected by who?’ I asked him.
Kelstein smiled at me again. Nodded.
`A perceptive question,’ he said. `You instinctively grasp that an operation of that size is so visible, so complex, that it must be in some way sponsored. Joe believed it was protected by, or maybe even owned by, the Syrian government. Therefore his involvement was marginal. His conclusion was that the only solution was diplomatic. Failing that, he was in favour of air strikes against it. We may live to see such a solution one day.’
`And the second place?’ I asked him.
He pointed his finger at his grimy office window. Aiming south down Amsterdam Avenue.
`South America,’ he said. `The second source is Venezuela. Joe had located it. That is what he was working on. Absolutely outstanding counterfeit hundred dollar bills are coming out of Venezuela.
But strictly private enterprise. No suggestion of government involvement.’
I nodded.
`We got that far,’ I said. `A guy called Kliner,
based down in Georgia where Joe was killed.’ `Quite so,’ Kelstein said. `The ingenious Mr
Kliner. It’s his operation. He’s running the whole
thing. We knew that for certain. How is he?’ `He’s panicking,’ I said. `He’s killing people.’ Kelstein nodded sadly.
`We thought Kliner might panic,’ he said. `He’s protecting an outstanding operation. The very best we’ve ever seen.’
`The best?’ I said.
Kelstein nodded enthusiastically.
`Outstanding,’ he said again. `How much do you know about counterfeiting?’
I shrugged at him.
`More than I did last week,’ I said. `But not enough, I guess.’
Kelstein nodded and shifted his frail weight forward in his chair. His eyes lit up. He was about to start a lecture on his favourite subject.
`There are two sorts of counterfeiters,’ he said. `The bad ones and the good ones. The good ones do it properly. Do you know the difference between intaglio and lithography?’
I shrugged and shook my head. Kelstein scooped up a magazine from a pile and handed it to me. It was a quarterly bulletin from a history society.
`Open it,’ he said. `Any page will do. Run your fingers over the paper. It’s smooth, isn’t it? That’s lithographic printing. That’s how virtually everything is printed. Books, magazines, newspapers, everything. An inked roller passes over the blank paper. But intaglio is different.’
He suddenly clapped his hands together. I jumped. The sound was very loud in his quiet office.
`That’s intaglio,’ he said. `A metal plate is smashed into the paper with considerable force. It leaves a definite embossed feel to the product. The printed image looks three dimensional. It feels three dimensional. It’s unmistakable.’
He eased himself up and took his wallet out of his hip pocket. Pulled out a ten dollar bill. Passed it over to me.
`Can you feel it?’ he asked. `The metal plates are nickel, coated with chromium. Fine lines are engraved into the chromium and the lines are filled with ink. The plate hits the paper and the ink is printed onto its topmost surface. Understand? The ink is in the valleys of the plate, so it’s transferred to the ridges on the paper. Intaglio printing is the only way to get that raised image. The only way to make the forgery feel right. It’s how the real thing is done.’
`What about the ink?’ I said.
`There are three colours,’ he said. `Black, and two greens. The back of the bill is printed first, with the darker green. Then the paper is left to dry, and the next day the front is printed with the black ink. That dries, and the front is printed again, with the lighter green. That’s the other stuff you see there on the front, including the serial number. But the lighter green is printed by a different process, called letterpress. It’s a stamping action, the same as intaglio, but the ink is stamped into the valleys on the paper, not onto the peaks.’