Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  I was just beginning to wonder if everyone had gone out the back door when Jamal strode into the vestibule in a Brooks Brothers pinstriper, slim as a jockey, Palm Pilot in hand. He looked as if he was on his way to a fund-raiser.

  “You know, you gentlemen really are dumb as dirt,” he said with an evil smile. I had the impression he was looking forward to Round Two with the Bureau. “Trust me, you’re about to find out it’s not worth the candle harassing me.”

  “Actually, I’m here from the Department of Education,” I said. “You’ve been found in gross violation of the Federal Minimum Intelligence Act. Come on outside and I’ll show you.”

  Jamal was so taken aback that he actually followed me. So did Genghis.

  “See the tanween over the yah?” I said, pointing at one of the accent marks in the sura on the bread window.

  Jamal leaned in for a closer look. “So what?”

  “It’s a grave solecism, it should have been—”

  “What the fuck you talkin’ about?”

  “You’ve desecrated the word of God, meathead. Get a real Muslim in here next time to do the sign right.”

  I’m really not as big an ass as I make myself sound. But what I needed right now was for Jamal to get serious about playing the role I’d cast him in. Calling into question his faith seemed to be the shortest route, and it apparently was working. Genghis couldn’t have understood a thing I’d said, but seeing Jamal’s face was all the guidance he needed. His right hand went under his jacket. He either intended to drop me right there or drag me back into the mosque and do it where he wouldn’t have to disturb the neighbors.

  One thing I know about gunplay is that when someone intends to shoot you and you don’t have a weapon, salvation lies in taking one step sideways and back, then another, and another. You move quickly enough and you don’t get hit. Or at least that’s what the knuckle-draggers down at the Farm tried to teach us. Just as I was getting ready to start shuffling, out of the corner of my eye I caught a white guy and an Asian woman sitting in a Ford Taurus station wagon parked at the corner of 116th and Frederick Douglass, less than half a block from where we were standing. Exactly where I hoped and prayed they would be, and in extreme discomfort from the locals gathering around them. Allah truly is great.

  “See those two there?” I said to Jamal. “I got all the backup I need.” By now the white guy was out of the car, talking on a cell phone. He’d been joined by two other white guys, materializing with a speed that suggested an entire Caucasian posse was about to ride over the ridge.

  Jamal nodded to Genghis, whose hand reappeared out from under his jacket. Not even Mike Lyon could help with an assault-on-a-federal-officer charge. But I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that John O’Neill would be getting a call from Lyon even before I caught a cab. And in less than a minute after that, the phones out at Langley would be lighting up like Times Square.

  I now knew one other thing beyond a shadow of a doubt, too. The FBI was capable of screwing up with the twosome in front of Quick & Reilly and the rest of the shitty tradecraft I’d caught along the way, but neither it nor the local police nor anyone else I could think of in this nation or abroad would be idiotic enough to field a white surveillance team in Harlem. For that, you needed incompetence on a colossal scale. Langley had to be behind it. I was being followed by my own flesh and blood. All I had to do now was catch the 4 P.M. train back to Washington, get a good night’s sleep, and wait until morning to find out why.

  CHAPTER 5

  Langley, Virginia; June 22, 2001

  TALLEYRAND ADVISES EXPEDITING the inevitable. Figuring he knew something about getting out of scrapes, I showed up at headquarters right on the dot at eight, just as the time-card punchers were queuing up for admission. My plan was to stick my head into personnel and see if anything jumped out of its skin. Somebody had to have heard something about New York. Even a wild rumor would be comfort at this point. I’d passed the night imagining the worst, a talent my employer had once praised me for.

  No plan survives first contact. When I put my badge in the reader and tapped in my pin code, the red diode flashed instead of the green one. “Invalid identification,” the digital reader said. “Please see security officer.” Or, in everyday language: “Die like a rat in the road.”

  The bar ahead of me refused to drop down to let me through. The one behind stopped me from backing out of the stall. I felt like a rodeo steer waiting for someone to jump on my back and start kicking.

  Meanwhile, I could feel the stir of wage slaves staring at the back of my head, amazed to find yet another idiot who had forgotten his pin code. How can it be, in a place like Washington? I was about to yell over at the security guard sitting behind the console when this intern in a miniskirt came sidling up to me with a smile that showed her braces.

  “Are you Mr. Maxwell Waller?”

  “Guilty.”

  The intern nodded at the security guard, who punched a button on his console, which lowered the bar behind me. When I had retreated sufficiently to make the point, the intern showed me into a room where you get photographed for your badge.

  Forget goths and all those scowling indie-label bands with names that seem to have been dragged out of the devil’s own handbook. These twenty-somethings waiting for their new badges were a wholesome, cheery lot! It didn’t take me long to figure out they were a new career trainee class checking into headquarters for the first time. One guy who looked like an ex–college cheerleader was actually going around introducing himself as if he’d just pledged. An aubergine-skinned girl was telling her neighbor how she was going to put in for Hindi language training so she could reconnect with her roots. Even the most blasé among them couldn’t contain his/her excitement at being admitted to the inner sanctum of U.S. intelligence. Mind you, the grins would soon enough be wiped off their faces, but who needs an over-the-hill case officer just stiffed by a magnetic reader to tell them that?

  I wished I had a book. Or a newspaper. Or a Walkman. Or maybe even a not-too-old Sharper Image catalog. Instead, I wondered what the bureaucratic warlords who ran the place thought they were doing by making me cool my heels with these frat boys and girls. If they really thought this was going to crack me, how late to Planet CIA had their spaceship arrived? The incident isn’t even classified. I’d been locked up two weeks in the basement of Lima’s counterterrorism slammer with an unrepentant assassin from the Baader-Meinhof gang. By comparison, the only thing this crew might drive me to do was go floss.

  One by one the room emptied. I was keeping company with vacant seats when two suits appeared at the door: Armani knockoffs. Neither of their occupants could have been more than five-six. The knotted muscles underneath the pure Bangladesh Dacron weave suggested the two were security, and so they were. One came over and grimaced as if to apologize for having to walk me up the scaffold. Pleasantries, words of any sort, were out of the question. Silent as a parade of Trappist monks, we crossed the marbled grandeur of the lobby to the director’s elevator, which ascends (just like the director himself) nonstop to the seventh floor.

  After a brisk lock-step down the hall, my faux-Armani escort deposited me at 7B26, the conference room of the assistant deputy director for counterespionage. A welcoming party was gathered for my arrival, but with the morning sun on the other side of the window, I couldn’t make out who was there.

  Vince Webber was the first to swim out of the glare. He was sitting at the end of the conference table, examining the back of his hand, acting bored as only a Romanian pimp can. He hadn’t changed a bit in all these years—pitted face, diamond Air Force Academy ring, gold neck chain gleaming through a diaphanous white shirt, gold Rolex watch.

  Vince, I suppose, had a right to look bored: It was his conference room. After a stint at the NSC kissing ass and a blitzkrieg through half a dozen seventh-floor jobs, strewing bodies all over the place, Vince was now the assistant deputy director for counterespionage—the CIA’s premier spy catcher. The director’s
brand-new Mr. Fixit. And believe me, after Rick Ames, counterespionage needed fixing. Putting a known loser, lush, and political fruitcake in a position to betray all the Agency’s Soviet assets happens only once (or twice, or thrice) in a lifetime.

  Jack Rosetti, the lawyer for the Directorate of Operations, was standing by the window, seemingly absorbed by the woods of northern Virginia as he jiggled the change in his pocket. Suspenders and a bow tie made Jack look at first glance like a Bond Street haberdasher, but he was far too talented to waste his time in the trades. Jack was a bureaucratic survivor. He had fashioned a long and obit-friendly career precisely by avoiding controversy and scandal. Jack Rosetti left no fingerprints. Anywhere. And he certainly didn’t want them on this little star chamber. My bet was he wanted to fly right through that case-hardened, laser-microphone-resistant plate-glass window and over the trees.

  Mary Beth Drew, ninety degrees to Vince Webber’s right, had recently been named chief of security, but she had started her CIA life in the Directorate of Operations. We were in Rangoon together in 1988 when the junta crushed the democratic insurrection. Since then, she’d grown a double chin and cut her hair short in a pageboy. Now in her pressed black pants suit and crisp white oxford button-down shirt, she seemed to have settled quite nicely into the seventh floor. The slight flare of her nostrils told me that Mary Beth knew I was in the room, but she wouldn’t break off leafing through her stack of traffic to have a look.

  The other half dozen people around the conference table were strangers every one. No surprise. A whole new generation of PowerPoint and one-page-memo wizards had taken over the top floor in recent years. The average age was maybe thirty. They all lived in townhouses somewhere down I-95 in Virginia, an hour-plus commute to Langley, in “planned communities” where the schools are good and crime means running a stop sign. They never went into D.C. for dinner because it was too dangerous. If they’d traveled at all, it was to London or Tel Aviv. The places I’d spent my life in they’d only seen in their nightmares.

  Like Mary Beth Drew, Vince Webber pretended not to notice me until I walked right up to him. When he couldn’t pretend any longer, he shot up and shook my hand as if I had just dropped out of the sky in front of his eyes. Vince motioned me over to the corner. Looking over at the rest of the assembly, he said in a whisper, “Max, sorry we’re not meeting under happier circumstances.”

  Like Dubai, I thought.

  I’d worked briefly for Webber when he was running Iranian ops out of Dubai, just long enough to figure out he didn’t know shit about tradecraft. Shortly after I left, the Iranians rolled up all our networks except for one informant, an out-and-out fabricator whose bent and crooked tales were for Webber’s ears only. A closed circle that yielded absolutely nothing. I think the reason Vince had never been able to stomach me in the years since was that I knew the truth, but the new Vince Webber was way too polished to let old wounds fester in public.

  “This will all work out, don’t worry,” he whispered as he put a reassuring hand on my shoulder and guided me to a chair.

  I’d been assigned the oral-examinee seat, a touch lower and narrower than the others, set just off the far narrow end of the table where the rest of the conferees could contemplate me as if I were some rare and not particularly tasteful zoological specimen. Fair enough, I thought. That much they’ve got right.

  There was a timid knock, a small stir. Whoever had come in late slid a chair up behind someone sitting halfway down the table, opposite the window. The newcomer refused to look my way, but I caught just enough glimpse as he took his seat to see that it was a guy I knew named Jim. Last name irrelevant. He’d been a security officer in Moscow back when I was working in the Fergana Valley. But what was he doing here? Now?

  From his seat at the far, power end of the table, Webber nodded at a man sitting midships on the window side. He was wearing a pair of bifocals with thick plastic frames that you don’t find at your local For Eyes anymore. The broken blood vessels in his cheeks and nose gave him a pink glow, offset by a green retiree’s badge. Just to complete the effect, he had one of those small goatees you see on aging men who drive Miatas and cover their bald spots with Greek fishing caps.

  “Mr. Waller,” Bifocals started, “we’d like to know what you were doing in New York yesterday?” His voice reminded me of the Bea Arthur character in The Golden Girls, a show I’d seen too often on visits to my own golden-yeared aunt.

  “On leave. A personal day. Visiting friends.”

  “We know that much. Please tell us what you did after you visited your friend.”

  Look confused, I told myself. Bifocals and I and everyone around the table knew the game: Never get chatty. You hand your interrogators a narrative on a silver platter and they’ll pick it over at their leisure. Make them work. They’ll forget to ask you something or end up saying something they hadn’t intended to. It’s as basic as not blowing your nose on the tablecloth at the Palm.

  “After?” I said, trying to sound genuinely lost.

  “You know what I mean.” Bifocals was irritated and wanted me to know it. I took a guess that he, too, was from counterespionage. Like the Gestapo, they expected instant submission.

  “I am talking about the evasive actions you took in New York, which we are interpreting as an effort to impede an investigation.”

  Rosetti reluctantly took his queue. “I just got off the telephone with the FBI’s general counsel. They’re hunkered down waiting for a suit from a Mr. Jamal.”

  “Hold on, Jack,” I said, my turn to be irritated. “Are we wasting each other’s time around this table because I dragged a surveillance team through Harlem? I’ll confess, then: I did it. They were so inept I had to assume they were petty criminals. I deliberately ambushed them. It’s S.O.P. Now, why don’t you slap my hand or make me clap the erasers out the window, and we can all get back to work.”

  The astounding prismatic transformation of Bifocals’ face—from pink to red to an almost 911-purple—filled in the first blank for me. The surveillance had belonged to counterespionage. No wonder Rick Ames practically had to pull his dick out and wave it in a circle in Lafayette Square before anyone would pay attention.

  Mary Beth peered over her almond-shaped reading glasses at me long and hard before she finally broke the silence. “Dusting off some old Moscow tricks, are we, Maxwell? Pre-perestroika? The bad Russians?”

  “Maggie, Maggie, it wasn’t just Moscow. That’s the way we did things in Beirut, Monrovia, Sarajevo, Kabul—we ran the bad guys into a meat grinder. You remember Rangoon, don’t you? Contour flying? Adjust your tactics to the threat?”

  Mary Beth glared at me, and with cause: I was not being my kindest. She had lasted less than two months in country—pulled out with a providential case of hepatitis B and dumped onto the admin track instead. She never could spot a tail during her short stay in Rangoon, and so far as I know, she never shipped overseas again. That was one point against me. The other was nomenclature: She detested the nickname Maggie as much as she did case officers. God help us when she transferred back into the Directorate of Operations and took over some mega-station like New York or London.

  I wasn’t going to let the advantage go, though. I knew her well enough that if I provoked a little more, she would give up something. “New York isn’t Moscow, Maggie. I’d assumed we were too civilized to follow each other around in our own country. And, small point maybe, but I don’t think aping the KGB is going to make us better spies.”

  Mary Beth looked up at the ceiling, as if to say, See what I told you? There’s nothing to be done with this cowboy.

  Webber cleared his throat and nodded again at Bifocals, who responded by pushing a black-and-white glossy down the table my way: a grainy photograph of me walking into what had to be a Paris bistro, taken from maybe a hundred feet away.

  “Not bad for DEA,” I commented.

  I’d had only a quick glance, but Bifocals’ surprise told me I was right about the origin of the photo
, too. He needed help.

  “The date time group in the lower-left corner,” I said. “It’s DEA’s. By the way, I didn’t catch your name.”

  “Scott.”

  I couldn’t remember what the bistro was called. There was a bird involved somehow, or maybe a fish. Maybe both: The Flying Carp? Some such. The point is, I used to go there a lot. It was off Rue Mabillon. Judging by what I was wearing, an old double-breasted suit and a frayed wool turtleneck that made me look like a down-and-out French intellectual, the picture must have been at least ten years old. I was in my light Camus disguise back then. Unless I was mistaken, the tattered paperback just barely peeping out of my side suit pocket was La Peste.

  “Who were you meeting there?” Scott asked.

  “Where?” I was momentarily disoriented.

  “Paris,” he said, with the tried patience of a road-show Job.

  “I can’t remember.” In fact, I couldn’t.

  “Let me see if I can help. José Marco Cabrillo was having lunch there that day.”

  That I hadn’t expected. I’d never met Cabrillo, of course, never broken bread with him, never clinked Pernods, but I knew him by reputation—a vicious Nicaraguan drug dealer. He’d been assassinated in Batumi, Georgia, a year earlier.

  “Ever worked France before?” I said. My irritation was starting to edge toward anger, a bad idea. “Any of you?” I nodded in apology to Webber: He knew that I knew that he had. “On any given day there are thousands of narcos, arms dealers, and pimps lunching in Paris. Lunch is what people do in Paris, and they pay for it by selling drugs, Kalashnikovs, and hookers. The French don’t give a damn as long as they’re not clipping the locals or cutting too deep into their baksheesh. If you’re right about Cabrillo and me in the same restaurant on the same day, it’s a coincidence.”

  I waited for Scott to continue. There had to be more.