Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  CHAPTER 10

  I RETURNED TO MY APARTMENT the same way I’d left it. The El Salvadoran kid was slumped by the Dumpster, asleep or dead. I held a finger under his nostril until I felt him breathe. God knows what he’d been given to desert his post across the street, but he seemed to have swallowed it or smoked it or snorted it all at once. Next door, inside the Dumpster, the rats were jammin’.

  The basement was quiet. So were my three rooms. I looked for signs that someone had tossed the place while I was away but found none.

  “Per normal,” I said to no one in particular. “I’ve got no idea what I’m doing.”

  I sorted through the yellow pages, found a number for Air France, and called to book passage to Paris: Flight 19 out of Newark at 7:45 the next evening. I’d take Amtrak up. I was about to book all the way to Zurich but changed my mind. Why make it easy on them? I’d make the last leg from Paris to Zurich by train.

  Did I want to travel light or take part of my previous life with me? It took all of a minute to decide. I grabbed a steak knife, slit the couch across the back, reached in and removed two stolen passports along with twenty thousand dollars American and another three thousand in mixed pounds, francs, and marks. I’d bought the passports—Irish and German—in Macau from pickpockets. A tech friend had substituted my picture for the owners’ and put in U.S. entry stamps. I was sure I’d be just fine with my own passport in my own name, but hauling along the stolen passports couldn’t hurt. It was sort of like taking two credit cards on a date so you’re not embarrassed if one’s rejected. In omnia paratus—prepared in all things, a motto for Boy Scouts and ex–CIA officers on the lam.

  Out in the hallway, the utility room door was still ajar. I slipped inside, retrieved the alligator clips from the top of the interface terminal, and again availed myself of the ménage à trois’s line to dial a number on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I didn’t care who knew I was heading for Europe, but I wasn’t about to burn an asset. I had this feeling I’d be needing every one of them.

  “O’Neill.” The voice was full of sandpaper. He’d been pulled from a deep sleep.

  “John, it’s me. Max. Waller.”

  “What the—”

  “Meet me at Newark Airport tomorrow at five P.M. The Air France counter.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do.”

  I unclipped the wires, relocked the door this time, and went back to my apartment. I had enough bottles and cans in my recycle bin to build a three-foot tower just inside the door. All the windows were barred against the practical reality of living on the ground floor in the inner city. My pants were dry enough to sleep in. I slid the passports and money in my jacket pocket and curled up under the blankets. For good measure, I kept the steak knife with me under the pillow. I would have slept better with a mini Uzi at my side, but it was field expediency all the way.

  As I lay there listening to the night noises—each muffler pop sounding like a small explosive, each noise on the street like bangers closing in—the one thing that kept rolling through my mind was this: Do I take the Peshawar photo with me, or do I destroy it and give up the score-keeping like Frank told me to do? The answer seemed obvious. Destroying it would lift a rock off me. It would give me part of my life back. I also knew that if I did destroy it, the part of my life that kept me going would be missing.

  I got up in the dark in case anyone was keeping watch, made it to the kitchen in a low crouch, and felt behind the refrigerator until I found the envelope I’d taped there. Inside was the photo. I folded it carefully into fourths and put it in my pocket next to the passports. Now I could sleep.

  CHAPTER 11

  Newark, New Jersey; June 23, 2001

  NEWARK INTERNATIONAL LOOKED LIKE a cockroach nest in mating season, and Air France was right in the middle of it. The place teemed with families, people going home for summer holiday, and those running away from it, drifters, grifters, the lame and the halt, enough nuns and priests to stuff a sacristy, wailing infants, lost ancients, the whole wonderful-horrible gamut of air-going humanity. At the El Al counter, a black-clad Jew in broad-brimmed hat tugged his forelocks, rocked on his heels, and bemoaned the wholesale price of diamonds. He was carrying a miniature safe under one arm. Just down the way at Ethiopian Airlines, a clutch of dainty-featured nomads clung to empty chicken crates, dejected that they weren’t allowed to carry the birds on board with them. A tour director with an open umbrella was leading a parade of golden-years couples to what looked like, by their body language, a sure and certain doom.

  “Keep up back there!” she kept shouting. “Keep up!”

  Christ, I was thinking, how could you even try to screen all of these people? A punk-rock band queuing up for a flight to Gatwick had more piercing between them, pound for pound, than a 155-millimeter artillery round.

  One corner of Terminal B was occupied by college kids on their way to Europe for summer vacation. They and their bulging backpacks and their Lonely Planets and Rough Guides and Frommer’s Budget books—Paris on $20 a Day, Monte Carlo on a Shoestring—were piled everywhere. The shits blocked counters, bathrooms, entrances. They flailed their arms, air-guitaring and lip-synching to private tunes on their headsets; stank, farted, belched; shouted to one another; sighed meaningfully to themselves.

  Fin de siècle, the new millennium, the long, rich ride of the nineties—whatever it was, something had unmoored the land, the people; had made travel not a joy or an adventure but some kind of twisted imperative. Gotta go. Gotta go. Gotta go. It made me long for a time I never knew when transcontinental planes had sleeping berths and every man wore a tie.

  I carved out a few square feet at the end of the Air France counter, down where they roll out the red carpet for first-class passengers, and kept a lookout for O’Neill. Just to my left, a girl in a Muhlenberg College sweatshirt spent twenty minutes on her cell phone declaring eternal love to some poor sap forced to spend the summer with his parents in what I took to be Hershey, Pennsylvania. Acne scars dotted one cheek. Her fat thighs had been poured into a pair of jeans that fit like sausage skins. It looked as if her ass was growing out her abdomen. A MEAN PEOPLE SUCK button was jammed into her neon pink fanny pack.

  I was pinching the skin under my jaw, the rising turkey waddle, feeling creaky among this golden youth, when someone grabbed my free arm, twisted it up high behind my back, and practically lifted me off the ground before I fell facedown into a pile of luggage ID tags. It was, of course, John O’Neill.

  “Max, you’re slow. You’ve lost it.”

  I bent my head around just far enough to see him beaming to the Air France personnel as if he’d just walked out on the Letterman set. In his free hand, he was holding his wallet, flipped open to his creds. I half expected the crowd to break out into applause.

  “This better be good.” He was bent closer now, hissing in my ear. “I should have snagged your ass and overnighted it in Rikers when I had the chance. Jamal and his lawyer are all over us.”

  “Burn him down and bag his ashes.” My arm ached.

  “His ashes?”

  “If you could let go—”

  “Party’s over, folks,” O’Neill called out, pocketing his wallet again. “Training exercise.”

  “Je lui ai defonce son cul,” I called out in turn, in my foulest French, just to piss him off, “et depuis il ne me lache plus.”

  The Air France people turned away in disgust.

  I stretched my arm out, turned it this way and that just to make sure the ligaments were still intact, then took out my wallet, sorted through a few weeks’ worth of receipts, lifted out a rumpled, soiled scrap of legal pad covered with a long string of digits, and handed it over to O’Neill. His dramatics had the happy effect of cordoning off the space around us. Who knew, we both might be rabid.

  “Your dentist’s phone number?” he said. “Big deal. I’m sure I couldn’t afford his services.”

  Actually, I was pretty sure he could. I didn’t know where John got hi
s money, but he never seemed to leave his apartment without being wrapped up in a couple thousand dollars’ worth of threads, and he never had a drink at home when three at Elaine’s would do.

  “Too many digits,” I told him. “Look again.”

  “Your new extended-extended zip code?”

  “How about an unreported foreign account—”

  “You lying sack—”

  “—in St. Kitts.”

  “—of shit.”

  He turned the scrap over and read the name on the back.

  “Belongs on paper to a nominee-controlled company in Panama. But it’s Jamal’s. Get the Panamanians to haul in the nominee, and you got him cold. He’s been squirreling money there for years, where Uncle Sam can’t tax it. Even a rich sister can’t get him out of this one.”

  Silence.

  “We pulled it out of the air.”

  I knew that would get his attention. O’Neill had zero confidence in the Agency’s ability to penetrate American black Muslim groups or for that matter any Muslim group anywhere, but he did know we picked up some enlightening “chatter” from time to time, little bytes like nominee-controlled accounts that we rarely showed to the Bureau.

  “How long have you had it?”

  “Couple months.”

  “Why now?”

  “I love you. I want to have your child.”

  “Why—”

  The space around us was shrinking by the second, the freshmen mixer creeping in like some unstoppable mold. The fat girl from Muhlenberg College had been replaced by a scrawny, ferret-faced kid in a filthy Hofstra T-shirt who was eating two Slim Jims at the same time.

  “Outside,” O’Neill said, stuffing the piece of paper I’d given him into his shirt pocket. “Follow me.” In his thin black silk socks and soft Italian loafers, he looked more like a Mafia capo than the FBI’s top spy and terrorist catcher in New York.

  The truth was I’d done a lot of favors, public and private, for John O’Neill over the seven years since Ramzi Yousef had been kind enough (sort of) to introduce us by trying to blow up the World Trade Center. Among other items, I’d helped him investigate the murder of Freddie Woodruff, an American diplomat in Tbilisi. He needed me, too, because the State Department was doing anything and everything to cover up the fact that a murder had occurred at all.

  “How the fuck do you shoot someone in a car with an AK-47 and not break a window or pierce the skin?” O’Neill asked one lunch over a pair of single-malts at the Palm.

  I had the same question. Woodruff had been stationed with the U.S. embassy in Tbilisi, in Georgia, when an off-duty soldier fired a single round through the back of Woodruff’s Neva, miraculously passing between the rear window and the skin of the car. (Okay, there was a hole in the rubber seal, but it sure looked as if it had been made with a pen.) The police called it an accident. O’Neill’s and my hypothesis was 180 degrees different: Someone probably stopped the car, pulled Woodruff out, shot him in the back of the head, and stuffed him in the rear seat. But we were a minority. The Georgian version was just fine with the State Department. This was 1994: Washington couldn’t get enough of Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian president. Better to bury the dead and swallow some half-assed explanation that didn’t even bother with ballistics than risk upsetting a Prince of Perestroika. Unless, like O’Neill and me, you cared about the truth.

  I happened to be passing through New York back to Washington when we hashed over Woodruff, so I agreed to snoop around the Mothership and see what I could find that might give John a little ammunition to use against State. Two weeks later, when he was down in Washington visiting his own headquarters, I had him out to Langley, forced a government coffee down his throat, and showed him a defector’s report that said Russian military intelligence, the GRU, had assassinated Woodruff pretty much as O’Neill and I had figured: opened the back of the Neva, popped him with a subsonic assassination round fired from a derringer, then poked the hole in the rubber seal to make it look like a stray, seeing-eye bullet had somehow done the dirty work. Just another GRU “liquid operation.” It wasn’t the final word, but it sure made a lot more sense than the lie Warren Christopher wanted us to swallow.

  I suppose if you had asked either one of us, O’Neill and I both would have said we were friends. To the extent that he truly liked anyone tainted by Langley, I’m certain it was me. I’m pretty sure the reverse was true, too. I’ve never known a group with more pokers deeper up their asses than the FBI, but that wasn’t O’Neill. Still, friendship among the professionally paranoid—and that included both of us—is a peculiar thing. It always comes with a price, always has a quid pro quo, a truth for a truth. Never stop trading. I’d done my turn. It was his now, and he knew it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me the Agency was following me?” I began.

  O’Neill had left his old blue Buick Regal out front in the drop-off lane, a red gyro light on the dash. We leaned against the doors on the driver’s side.

  “Because they weren’t.”

  “Come on,” I said, “they as much as admitted it.”

  He was firing up a cigar, a lighter so elegant and razor thin that it was impossible to imagine where the wick and flint and whatever the hell else goes into a lighter might fit.

  “Max, you forget. I’m the sheriff up here. I own the town.” He took a deep puff on the cigar and let the smoke linger in his mouth. “I know those clowns weren’t yours.”

  “And?”

  “Right after you called, I sent a car up to the mosque to see what the hell you were up to. My guy was in place before you got there. He thought the Kazak goon was about to clip you when you came outside.”

  “He was.”

  “Why do I think he might have saved me a lot of trouble if he had.”

  I was eyeing a green Plymouth Gallant about ten yards downstream from us, trying to figure out why the traffic cops weren’t moving it along.

  “At any rate, he got down the plates of the cars that followed you up there. They were registered to Applied Science Research.”

  “Big deal. An Agency proprietary.”

  “Google it. Applied Science Research is a publicly held company. You guys got money to burn, but not like that.”

  He was right. The Agency owned hundreds of phony shelf companies, usually operated out of the offices of broke lawyers who’d do anything for a buck. But it never owned publicly held companies. Cost aside, it couldn’t risk an SEC investigation or a shareholder suit.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “There was a guy at my show trial—green retiree badge, bifocals. He all but admitted it was his team. He had to be counterespionage.”

  “Did he tell you that? Or did you assume it?”

  “Assume what? Counterespionage?”

  “No. That he was one of yours, and not a retiree working for some Beltway bandit.” O’Neill was trying to put his now-extinguished cigar back in its tube.

  “He was there, for crissake. The seventh floor. We’re not outsourcing counterintelligence!”

  But even as I said it, I knew I could be wrong. The Dulles Corridor was thick with Agency retirees working for Beltway bandits with CIA contracts: SAIC, Booz Allen, DynCorp, Titan, McDonnell Douglas. Everyone I knew seemed to be doing it once they hit the magic fifty: Retire on a Friday, back in the building Monday morning with a shiny new green badge. They usually did scut work: hawking new computers and software, compiling statistics, rewriting accounting regulations. But who cared? They doubled their salaries overnight, while the companies that hired them got experts trained on the taxpayers’ tab and a straight shot into the vitals of the CIA, where they could work on landing more contracts so they could make more money so they could fund the reelection campaigns of the favorite congressmen who gladly kept the merry-go-round spinning.

  That wasn’t the seventh floor’s view, of course. It billed outsourcing as a slam-dunk win all the way around. The DCI could boast that he was tapping America’s “corporate expertise”—bu
zzwords Congress loved to hear—even as he was tap-dancing his way around personnel ceilings imposed by the Office of Management and Budget. More to the point, hiring retirees in these jobs was a great way to “keep them in the family”—i.e., buy their silence. A six-figure salary on top of an Agency retirement was a fabulous incentive to make anyone think twice about writing a book or tattling to the press about how dismal things are in the Agency. Your classic golden handcuffs.

  So maybe we were outsourcing counterintelligence. War would be next. But I didn’t have the time to think about that. I needed something solid to grab on to, and my interrogator, Scott, seemed a good start. If I could find out who he was, I might find out why he had it in for me.

  “You might have met him out at headquarters—thick plastic glasses, goatee, skinny as a rail except for a paunch that slops over his belt. Red face like, well…” I waved in the direction of O’Neill’s own broken vessels and capillaries.

  “It’s genetic.”

  “It’s Elaine’s.”

  “Elaine’s is genetic!”

  O’Neill was bent over, checking himself in the side mirror, making sure his tie was centered just so.

  “Soft as shit and twice as nasty?” he said once he had straightened up. “He might have come to an interagency meeting down at State to talk about embassy security. Gordon, I think his name was.”

  “He told me Scott.”

  “As I remember, he was wearing a Department of Army badge, but I could tell he belonged to you.”

  I didn’t bother asking how.

  “Did he work for Applied Science?”

  “What do you think I did, brace him?”

  O’Neill got in the Regal, cranked it over, listened to the engine cough and sputter, then gave up.

  The traffic cops were walking by the green Plymouth for a third time without saying anything, not edging it along. Two women were sitting inside, doing none of the things women usually do when they sit together in a car: talk, fix their hair, file their nails, move their hands, move anything.