Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  The easy explanation was ineptitude, but there was another possibility: They’d exposed themselves on purpose. In Moscow we called it “dolphin surveillance”—now you see us, now you don’t. The way it worked was the KGB would start off with a sloppy team on you. You’d have to be blind not to pick up on it. Then, maybe an hour or two later, the team would drop off, disappear completely. You couldn’t even find their comms on your pocket scanner. It was as if the whole damn service had taken the afternoon off for a company picnic.

  The idea was to lure you into a false sense of security, give you the impression you were sparkling clean so you would go ahead and make your meeting, put down a drop, do whatever. But what really was going on was that the KGB had switched out the sloppy team for the pros. And it wasn’t just new people and new vehicles. They enlisted fixed militia posts and the police to call in your movements while the real watchers hung back out of sight. They also switched to military frequencies—so much traffic that a scanner was useless.

  That was Moscow, though. Who in New York would even know about dolphin surveillance? More to the point, who would use it on me, a taxpaying American on his own hook in the Free World’s Capital of Commerce?

  I’d almost convinced myself that the simplest answers are best when I pushed out the door to Forty-second Street and saw a guy exiting two doors down. Early forties, maybe. An elegant summer-weight cashmere sport coat topped by a screaming orange baseball cap. This time, at least, I hadn’t completely lost it. There’s nothing wrong with keeping your head covered, but a piece of crap like that in a 250-watt color on top of a pricey cashmere jacket?

  Chances are, this guy was the “eye”—the point man for the surveillance team, the sacrificial lamb who sticks to the target so the rest of the team can hang back out of sight. Follow the orange hat, and they’re following me. Simple, and way too much work for the little reward I offered. A reasonable person would have simply caught the shuttle to Penn Station, climbed on the next Amtrak back to Washington, and opted out of the game. Chase over. Go home. But for a guy who pretty much lies for a living, I’m perversely attached to the truth. I had to know if I was being followed and, if so, who it was. Who would lead me to why.

  First, though, I had to clean myself up—dump my cell phone, not wash my hands. Cells these days are not a lot different from those electronic bracelets used to monitor prisoners serving home sentences. Like Chris’s Breitling, they have built-in beacons that constantly transmit your position, your GPS coordinates. Even when a phone’s off, it keeps transmitting. A lot of supposedly street-savvy people think that removing the battery fixes the problem, but the pros aren’t that dumb.

  A couple weeks before, I’d dozed through an afternoon listening to some genius from the National Security Agency explain how he could conceal a capacitor in a cell phone to power its beacon. You can’t find the capacitor unless you take the whole thing apart, he swore—and know exactly (his emphasis, not mine) what you are looking for.

  Was my phone tricked? Possibly. Did I want to chance it? Definitely not, but I couldn’t just toss the phone in the nearest USPS mailbox. For one thing, I’d be seen and lose the element of surprise. Worse, the FBI carries keys to mailboxes. If that’s who was on me, they’d be crawling through my SIM card—the unique chip every cell phone operates off—before I got to Sixty-first Street. I had probably a couple hundred contacts stored on it. I wasn’t giving those up to anyone without a fight. I needed a real drop, and I knew the perfect place.

  I headed up Madison fast enough to string out surveillance behind me, then darted across the street at Fifty-fifth against the light, grazing a cab. The Sikh hacker celebrated my victory over death by rolling down his window and cursing me in Punjabi. Bhenchot! But this wasn’t the time to stop and tell him I didn’t have a sister, that one child was way too much for dear old Mom. Half a block later, I ducked into the showroom of the Sony building, raced through without breaking stride, and headed straight to the trash can in front of the Starbucks coffee bar on the backside. Surveillance would have had to have been inside the can to see my cell phone filtering down through the crushed cups and napkins.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  “A grande double latté con brio with hints of the Costa Rican sunset, and hold the mayo.”

  “Huh?”

  My server, if that’s what she was called, had a sterling-silver safety pin stuck through her nose. Other than that, she looked like a Girl Scout from Kansas.

  “House brew. Large,” I amended. She almost laughed.

  Reinforced paper cup in hand, I found a seat and paged through a well-fingered New York Post. The idea was to give surveillance a chance to catch up. When I figured that even an AARP flying squad could have gotten itself in place, I carefully folded the paper, returned it to the counter, and headed for the street. Time to move out and draw fire—Plan B.

  CHAPTER 3

  “All units, this is Selma. Che holding steady at five-five-oh Madison. Repeat, Che steady at—”

  “Selma, Selma, this is Oxford.”

  “Five-five-oh Madison, between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth.”

  “Selma—”

  “Oxford?”

  “Che just crossed Sixty-first on foot….”

  HALF OF EVERYTHING I KNOW about spotting surveillance I owe to Wild Bill Mulligan, my first boss in India, and it took just a single lesson.

  “Boy-o,” he said one day as we sat on the veranda at the Bombay Yacht Club, “the trick is to always look at the feet, the shoes. And in a pinch, pants. A good surveillance team carries along reversible jackets, neck braces, red straw hats, a raft of accessories from shopping bags to umbrellas, dogs to a watermelon—anything to distract you. Sleights of hand. But what they almost never do is change shoes. It’s awkward. Takes time. Shoes are hard to carry. Always watch the shoes.”

  Which is just what I was doing as I made my way up Madison Avenue. Fortunately, now that I had moved out of Midtown, people were fewer and farther between. So light was the sidewalk traffic as I cleared Sixty-second Street that I had time to focus my attention on a pair of extraordinarily fine and extremely unlikely suspects, neither more than a size six. When they turned into the Chanel store at Sixty-fourth, I thought, Why not? Browsing Chanel the way I was dressed was one sure way of drawing fire, on me and on anyone else who might find a couple thousand bucks a little steep for a crepe de chine blouse, even if the silk had been spun by free-range worms.

  The door had just closed behind me when it popped back open and in walked a doughy guy in his mid-fifties, brick face, bad comb-over, scarlet Ohio State vinyl jacket, polyester pants, and spotless white sneakers. He looked even more out of place in Chanel than I did, but the point is I was almost certain I’d seen him walking toward me ten blocks earlier. If I was right, I was now being tailed from in front, not behind.

  In the business, it’s called a “waterfall.” Whoever is in charge of the operation runs a hundred or more people at you in a constant stream. Two or three blocks after they’ve passed you by, they peel off onto a side street, get picked up by vehicles and ferried on a parallel street up above you, changing appearance every inch of the way, and then the whole process starts over again. I needed more evidence to be certain, but this little game was starting to take on a distinct smell.

  The two size-sixes I’d followed inside were already being treated to a private fashion show, complete with midday flutes of champagne. I might have joined them if a manager hadn’t floated in front of my face just then and asked if he could help me in a voice that suggested he’d rather walk naked through a landfill. I was turning for the door when he aimed the same question at Ohio State.

  “Just browsing,” the man mumbled.

  I ducked out in the confusion.

  Three blocks later, as I crossed Sixty-seventh Street, I took a peek to my left and sent a silent prayer to Wild Bill. There they were, those Puma arsenic-orange, powder-blue sneakers I’d last seen in front of Quick & Reilly, only
now they were attached to the feet of a woman in a long mouse-gray raincoat and a Phrygian knit cap. Apart from being out of season, the cap, I was sure, was hiding lavender highlights, but the sneakers, you could have spotted from a KH-11 satellite, ninety-two miles up.

  By now I was crisscrossing Madison, checking out art and antiques stores. Every run needs a logic that the surveillance team can buy into, and the East Sixties and Seventies are peppered with the kind of places I had decided to make today’s theme. Better still, since the shops and galleries are so close together, no one had to work very hard. I’d learned long ago that the best way to manage a surveillance team is to lull it into complacency. Make the chase easy on them, let them take in the sights, and never, ever piss them off. If you do, they’re sure to download the flak on you.

  At Sixty-eighth Street, I made a right, walked down a few doors, rang the bell at #14—a handsome brownstone and home to the world-famous galleries of Theodore Hew-Chatworth—and waited for the buzzer that would admit me to the stairs that would allow me entry to the second-floor showroom. If anyone was going to follow me in, he would either have to fast-rope off the roof or buzz the same buzzer and walk up the same flight of stairs I was climbing. Theodore was waiting for me himself, ever the gentleman.

  “Fuck you, flyface,” he said as he opened the door—an improvement, actually, over the last time we met.

  We had issues. Teddy was a small-time Texas con man until he copped two-to-five years for accepting tuition payments for a chain of imaginary day-care centers. No fool, he used his cell time to acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of Oriental art and an accent that, except in certain circumstances, would do an Anglican bishop proud. Back on the outside, he headed straight for New York to do his apprenticeship. Today he was one of the nation’s foremost dealers in Chinese antiques, but he’d never entirely escaped the con man he used to be.

  A decade earlier, a police dog had discovered a handsome cache of heroin, pure China white, packed inside a shipment of vases meant for Teddy’s store. The charge didn’t stick—Teddy claimed his forwarders in Macau were freelancing—but while they were looking into the case, investigators stumbled upon something that could have put him out of business for good. Antique porcelains are certified by thermoluminescence testing. Don’t ask: It’s to porcelains what carbon dating is to fossils. What matters is that Teddy and his Beijing partners developed a technique to scam the test so they could sell fake Chinese blue and white as the real thing. It gave me enough leverage to talk Teddy into running ops for us during his frequent trips to China. He never took the assignment gracefully, though.

  “Your phone,” I said, nodding at the sleek cordless Siemens on his desk.

  Phone in hand, I headed down the long side hallway to a bathroom marked Employees Only, locked myself inside, and phoned the Special Agent in charge of the FBI’s National Security Division. If the Bureau’s gumshoes were on me, John O’Neill would know it.

  His secretary answered the phone.

  I was two sentences into whatever lie I had concocted when O’Neill himself burst onto the line in all his larger-than-life glory.

  “Max, you asshole, what are you doing on my turf? If you’re up here operating, I’m gonna make sure you spend a cozy night at Rikers.”

  “Me? You’re the one running the op.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I got surveillance.”

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “They’re like flies at a shit roast.”

  “Come on.”

  “Trust me. You can’t miss these guys.”

  “All right. I’ll play. Hold on.”

  He was back in two minutes. “It’s not DEA or Customs or One Police Plaza.”

  It was my turn. With DEA, Customs, and the locals out of the mix, the list of candidates was becoming disturbingly thin. “Are you sure?”

  “Well, I could ask again and say ‘pretty please’ this time.”

  Point taken.

  O’Neill hated silence. “You been drinking?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, how about I send a car up and bring you in?”

  “Nope, but I might need you later.”

  “What have you got into now?”

  Damned if I knew, but I didn’t want to disappoint. O’Neill had once noted that I had a habit of burning my bridges before I got to them, and history was on his side.

  “Hey, John, remember that Black Panther, the one who became a Muslim?”

  “It still hurts where he took a bite out of my ass.”

  “I’m going to go see him.”

  “The fuck you are. If you so much as—”

  I hung up, splashed a little tap water on my face, and ran a quick check on the medicine cabinet. Viagra and crystal meth.

  “I was never here, Theodore,” I said, buzzing myself out his door.

  “If only. Where’s my phone?”

  “I left it on the back of the crapper.”

  “You fuck.”

  “Why don’t you run it through the thermoluminescencer. That should take care of the germs.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “All mobile units proceed uptown immediately. Stay close. Oxford has eye.”

  JOHN O’NEILL AND I WENT BACK to 1993, to the World Trade Center bombing. Our employers were famously antagonistic, and we had done our best at first to keep the cats-and-dogs skit alive. O’Neill never stopped reminding me that he caught bank robbers for his living, while I robbed banks for mine. But sometimes our interests intersected—he put the bad guys behind bars, I turned them—and Ramzi Yousef and his fellow truck bombers eventually brought us together.

  I think I might have been the one to come up with the idea of pitching Jamal Mohammad. It doesn’t matter now. O’Neill agreed to run it as a joint op and even got things started by digging up some dirt on Jamal from his Black Panther days, back when he had been simply Earl Price. The dirt wouldn’t put Jamal behind bars, but it was enough for a gang-plank recruitment à la the Great Hew-Chatworth. And it wasn’t like we were asking for the moon. We just wanted Jamal to travel to Tehran every once in a while. He certainly had the revolutionary Islamic credentials to get in and out without a problem, no small feat since we were unofficially at war with the ayatollahs there. Just to sweeten the deal, I’d talked our no-vision bean counters into letting him fly business-class. He was going to see the world on our dime, and do so in a seat 20 percent wider than coach.

  What we didn’t know until too late was that Jamal’s sister was an MIT engineer, founder of some fabulously successful niche dot-com company (think “cookies” and pop-up ads), and a devoted and generous sibling in the bargain. No sooner had O’Neill made the approach to Jamal than he phoned Sis, who rang up Mike Lyon, the last lawyer you’d ever want to meet in a courtroom. Lyon’s frontal assault on the FBI included a temporary restraining order forbidding it from going within three blocks of the little mosque Jamal ran in Harlem (funded liberally by you-know-who). Washington, of course, caved in an instant: That news cycle would be hell to manage.

  By the time the dust settled, Lyon had extracted not only a nice financial settlement for his client and himself but also a promise that the Bureau would never again talk to Jamal without Lyon’s permission. Note the word Bureau in the previous sentence: I’d been along on that initial meeting, but only as a silent partner. Jamal no doubt had assumed I worked for John O’Neill. While my bosses would rather have committed communal hari-kari than let me anywhere near Jamal, seeing him didn’t technically violate the Bureau’s agreement with Lyon.

  Up until now I’d been operating on Moscow rules: Shake the tree a little but don’t saw it down. Fine, I’d confirmed I had surveillance, but if I was going to learn more, I had to “go provocative,” as they know it back in Langley. I preferred my modified version: Beirut Rules—hit the bastards with everything short of one of those handy, backpack-size nuclear bombs. Only by really pissing them off could I force mistakes and make them show their ha
nd. Jamal was just the ticket.

  I hailed a cab around the corner from Teddy’s gallery and had the driver dump me fifty blocks north on West 116th, at the Columbia Law Library. Then I set off on foot down the hill and through Morningside Park, marveling as I went at how the fauna around me was changing from pretty much solid white to solid black. An ethnic two-step was sure to fry the watchers.

  The mosque on 116th still looked on the outside like the wall bakery it had been before Jamal moved in and started sprinkling around his sister’s money. The sliding window where the previous tenant had sold bread was now covered with a hand-painted sura from the Koran. The Arabic calligraphy was sloppy, but I knew the text by heart—the verse known as the Tawhid, or the Declaration of Oneness: There is no God but God….

  The two Sudanese in dishdashes sitting on plastic chairs out front didn’t seem to notice me as I pushed through the door, but the six-foot-five Mongol in a thigh-length black leather coat standing on the other side definitely did. I’d spent enough time in Central Asia to know he was a Kazak, the preferred hit men of the Russian mob. But what was Jamal doing with one?

  Genghis Khan moved fast to block me from going any further. “Shto?” he asked, with the open palm of his hand in my face. He said it with just enough menace to let me know that he’d eat my young if I tried going around. When I told him I had an appointment with Jamal, he disappeared behind a curtain. Hanging from the back of the only chair in the vestibule was an empty shoulder holster big enough for a 60-millimeter mortar. From somewhere inside the mosque wafted the sweet voice of Joni Mitchell. “Big Yellow Taxi.”