Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  “Those yours?” I asked, pointing my chin in the Plymouth’s direction.

  O’Neill didn’t even turn around to look. “I don’t need backup to meet an asshole like you.”

  I let it drop. No cause to make O’Neill think I was having a psychotic episode.

  “There’s one thing I forgot,” I said. “Jamal’s partner in Panama is a Swedish crook. Goes by the name Lars Larsen. He’s holding at least two accounts in his name for Jamal.”

  “Yeah, and there’s one thing I forgot, too. I checked out Gordon. He works for Applied Science.”

  Son of a bitch. O’Neill had known he was right all along. They’d not only outsourced surveillance but the counterintelligence investigation, too.

  “An Agency retiree?”

  “Nope. Just a corporate cog. He was hired out of IBM.”

  It was worse than I’d thought.

  “One last thing,” I said. “Don’t answer this if you can’t, but are you investigating the Cabrillo thing?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I got put on unpaid admin leave.”

  “I heard.”

  “Some bullshit narco charge.”

  “Forget the narco charge. That’s not what the investigation is about.”

  The Regal engine caught this time. He held the gas down until whatever was fouling the line cleared up. Then he took the gyro off the dash.

  “Where are you heading to, Maxie?”

  “Paris.”

  “A little R&R? Re-upping with tender Marissa?”

  “Actually, the end of the line is Zurich. I have a job there. The investigation?”

  “Millis,” he said.

  “John Millis?”

  No end to the surprises.

  “They want to tie you into the whole thing. Even suggested we hold you as a material witness.”

  “Whole thing?”

  “You don’t know? Some bright bulb out at the Fairfax medical examiner’s office isn’t buying suicide. You’ll love this: They found some old classified photograph with your prints on it in his motel room.”

  O’Neill gunned the Regal once more, just to let me know he was leaving.

  “What photo?” I asked. For some reason I was thinking about the DEA surveillance photo of me walking into the Paris bistro. If only.

  “You know what one.” And of course in that instant I did.

  “So what, I gave Millis a photo of bin Laden,” I said, feeling my jacket to make sure the Peshawar photo was still there. No point telling O’Neill I had a duplicate.

  “Millis didn’t know what bin Laden looked like?”

  “I thought Buckley’s kidnapper might be in the photo.”

  “Buckley’s dead, Max. I’m surprised no one told you.”

  “Ever wonder who kidnapped him?”

  “Ever hear about sticking to your own knitting? No one cares anymore. Case closed.”

  “Except for Buckley.”

  “You know, Max, heading for Switzerland isn’t the smartest thing.” He was looking at me as if I actually thought the dead might rise. “The script you were supposed to follow is stick around Washington and beg for your job back until they throw you some bone and you wag your tail like a good pup. S.O.P.”

  I didn’t say anything but O’Neill was right. Now that I thought about it, I realized Webber had given me his cell phone number only because he expected me to call him and surrender.

  O’Neill patted Jamal’s corporate account number in his shirt pocket and goosed the gas a last time. The Regal was purring now. “Are we okay?”

  “No.” It finally hit me full force what O’Neill had said. “Millis committed suicide. His fingerprints were on the trigger.” I was holding on to his door handle as if that somehow could stop O’Neill from pulling away.

  “Lookit. The problem is the brain splatter wasn’t where it was supposed to be. It was like he shot himself twice. Or someone else did. Or someone pulled his brain out his nose and smeared it around the bathroom.”

  O’Neill rolled up his window and pulled out into traffic.

  CHAPTER 12

  SOMETHING WAS RATTLING behind the bird’s-eye maple paneling next to David Channing’s elbow: some loose screw left behind by a quote-unquote “Old World master craftsman.” If they were too inept to screw in the paneling, what did they manage to mess up with the wings or the avionics? You had to be suicidal to fly these days.

  Boston was looming below him in the haze, lit by the early-morning sun. Somewhere under the soup was Cambridge…Harvard. Mother of Christ! And to think that puffed-up jackanapes Summers was going to run the place. He should have been impeached along with Clinton.

  He looked over to the galley where Jesse was preparing breakfast.

  “Jesse, come here,” he shouted. “I need another come-to-God talk with you.” He motioned to the seat next to his.

  “See what we’re flying over, Jesse?”

  “Boston, Mr. Channing.”

  “No. Harvard. You know how much those little snot-nosed kids pay to go to school there?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Thirty-seven thousand dollars, Jesse, more than I pay you in a year, and that’s without buying toilet paper to wipe their asses. And do you know what they get for it?” He paused two beats, waited for Jesse to answer although he knew he wouldn’t.

  “You’re right: fuck-all. It’s branding, Jesse, branding. They’re putting the mark on them so that when they drive away on Commencement Day in their spanking-new BMWs, everyone will know: ‘I’ve never had an original thought of my own. I’m safe. I take tests, I build résumés. I’ll never rock the boat. Daddy has enough dough so I’ll never be tempted to steal from you.’”

  Jesse remained silent looking out the window, his black face impassive. That’s why he found Jesse fascinating: He had no idea what he was thinking. Maybe everything. Maybe nothing.

  “Who was the last revolutionary to come out of Harvard? Don’t bother!” he screamed. “I’ll tell you! John Reed! John Fucking Goddamn Reed. Instead of the grand tour of Europe, he took the grand tour of the Russian Revolution, and the poor, dumb sonuvabitch didn’t understand fuck-all about anything going on around him. That’s Harvard for you.”

  Jesse kept looking out the window.

  “Jesse, Jesse, Jesse. We don’t seem to be getting anywhere. Remember how we talked about my great-great-granddaddy? How he stole half the forests of North America? Cut ’em down and made so much money that no one in his family for generations and generations would have to clean his own toilet again?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jesse said, staring straight ahead. “Yes, sir, I do remember.”

  “That’s my point, Jesse. That’s why I get to be a happy cliché and you don’t. That’s why I own a four-thousand-square-foot pied-à-terre on Central Park West. That’s why I have my own island off Maine, why my second cousin is secretary of defense, why everyone’s afraid not to take my calls. It’s Great-Great-Granddaddy. He understood. He knew that power, real power, has nothing to do with those little Harvard shits. They’re the ones I hire, Jesse. They’re the ones I pay to clean my toilets because they’re so fucking safe.”

  Jesse lifted an eye at him. He’d been Lysoling and polishing the head to a bright shine while the plane was taxiing for takeoff.

  “It’s a metaphor, for crissake. Figurative language! Dammit, Jesse, something’s wrong. If there’s something I can do and you don’t tell me, I’m gonna get mad.”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “Go get yourself a drink and me one, too, a champagne. A blanc de noir.”

  Harvard. The great liberal camp-out. More clueless, whining intellectuals per square inch than any other place on earth. Kennedy’s brain trust, the kindergarten that completely missed the Sino-Soviet split and got us into Vietnam. And now it’s 2001 and they’re still trading in that Fukuyama crap about liberal democracy and the end of history. The global village, globaloney.

  It’s as if they’d never heard
of an intercontinental ballistic missile. As if the Chinese hadn’t stolen the plans for our miniaturized nuclear warheads and weren’t peddling copies around the world like egg rolls. Rwanda is going to go nuclear before those dumb bastards stir from their slumber. And oil? They think you can go down to the local Starbucks and put all you need on your credit card. When the Chinese own it all, they might just catch on. Just wait: They’ll get their wake-up call to the twenty-first century. The sooner the better.

  There was a glint off to his left, low on the bulkhead opposite him—some kind of nameplate he had never noticed before. He slid into the seat next to it and bent to read: “The cabin of this Gulfstream G5-400 has been customized exclusively for the comfort of…” And then his own name in a flowing script—all of it, for crissake: “David Oliver Channing.” They’d even managed to work in the logo he had designed himself: a C impaled on a sword.

  The loose screw or whatever the hell it was was ping-ping-pinging in his head.

  He crossed back over to his own seat, called out a number in Falls Church, Virginia, and listened as the recognition software converted his voice into beeps and whirs—another company he owned, which incidentally was a gold mine. The telephone rang seven times before the answering machine kicked in. Count on it: General Dynamics stock might be doing okay for the moment, but it was headed for the crapper. Flush and gone. It was—what?—already 8 A.M. and the goddamn owner of the company was still fiddling with his dick at home. Why didn’t he have his secretary answer his private line? That’s what civilized people do. Maybe the bastard was caught in traffic. Traffic is a goddamned nightmare in Washington. Everything is a nightmare in Washington, no matter who’s in charge.

  “George,” he yelled when the please-leave-a-message beep finally came on. “I didn’t spend forty million for your goddamn G5 so I could listen to screws rattle like some goddamn mariachi band. Fire the sonsuvbitches, or I’ll buy the company and fire you!”

  Channing roared with laughter as he hit the “off” button. “Welcome to your new day, Georgie.” He made it sound like an obscenity. “Hope it’s a swell one.”

  They’d known each other since they were kids: York Harbor, Yale, Skull & Bones. They’d even dated the same girl for a while back when they were classmates at Choate: a Cabot from Miss Porter’s who spoke only to the Lodges, who spoke only to God. Stuck-up, lockjawed bitch wouldn’t let you have any titty if you begged for it. Where was she now? Six feet under probably. Thin blood. The curse of the Brahmin class. He reached up and found the little pulsing artery in his neck, timed it against his watch: fifty-seven beats a minute. A congenitally slow heart: He’d live forever. Ha!

  Breakfast in Bar Harbor, lunch in Sun Valley. Life is good.

  They were still climbing. He could see Providence below; New Haven and Long Island, just cresting on the horizon.

  “Nils,” he said into the intercom, “don’t forget to take her low around the bottom end of Manhattan.”

  He loved Nils, had hired him away from SAS. Nils could put a plane down on washboard rubble, and you wouldn’t feel a thing. They were still climbing.

  “Nils?”

  “Permission, Mr. Channing. I’m trying to get permission to alter our flight plan.”

  He called out another phone number, knew this one would be answered. No one ever slept at the White House.

  “Yes?”

  “I want you to call my pilot immediately, and I want you to tell him he has permission to alter our flight plan as requested.”

  “I’ll need—”

  “Immediately. I think that still means ‘at once.’”

  He clicked the phone off, signaled to Jesse for another champagne. Seventy seconds passed by his watch before the plane began to level out. Ninety-three seconds before he felt the first slight shift of a descent.

  He called the White House number again. “You’re very good,” he said, and hung up. He could hear it through the silent phone line: The man he had just spoken to would sell his own daughter into white slavery for the chance to come work for him. And why not? Administrations come and go. Incompetents elected by morons. Morons voted out by nincompoops. There’s only one constant in the primeval soup: oil. Buy it from the rag-heads. Sell it to the Harvard grads. And let the Hebes keep everyone in line. Better than Great-Great-Granddaddy’s trees. Trees are renewable. Sort of. Oil is the endgame.

  “There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.” He could remember the little androgynous prig of a teacher reciting that to them in Fourth Form, in his fake Shakespearean English. Still, something must have stuck because that’s precisely what he had done: taken the tide at the crest, seen first from a little perch at State, then a higher one in the Reagan administration, and rode the wave all the way in. Georgie-Porgie had been there with him—dueling assistant secretaries of defense—but Georgie had the imagination of dog shit. Always had. That’s why he was a boardroom serf. That’s why I’m not.

  Channing made a note to himself: Endow chair. Surely someone would remember the teacher’s name.

  The G5 was hugging the coast of Connecticut: Bridgeport, Westport, Darien, Stamford, Greenwich. Sweeping down the East River, he could see the commercial jets backed up on the runway at La Guardia, the helicopters grounded on their rooftop pads, all for him. And then there they were, right out the starboard windows: those twin Bastard Bauhaus atrocities, banality itself posing as architecture. God, they’re hideous.

  The Weimar Republic. There was that fraud Fukuyama’s great goddamn liberal democracy. What a wonderful success that was. And let’s not forget we have Weimar to thank for the Bauhaus movement that single-handedly destroyed two thousand years of architecture. Walter Gropius was a Jew, wasn’t he? Jew-loving Harvard Rockefellers did the World Trade Center deal. Jew movies, Jewollywood, Jew-loving faggots and niggers conned the rest of the morons into believing it was—What? What?—architecture? Beauty? Truth? Fuck. Skirting the towers in a hard bank, putting them out of his sight, climbing into the thin air over New Jersey—it was the closest thing he’d had to an orgasm in a long time.

  “Nils,” he said into the intercom, “that was memorable.” I’ll take him skiing in Chile, he thought: He’d once seen Nils snowboard down a thirty-five-plus-degree chute and never slow down—amazing!

  There was a hum up by the front bulkhead, some beeps and rings barely audible. The HP fax, not the clattery Brothers one next to it. Only four people knew the HP number. Jesse jumped up to attend to it.

  “Down!” Channing shouted. “I’ll get it!”

  He gathered the pages as they came out, pulled out a new packet of Hammermill Copy Plus from the drawer below the machine, and fed a stack into the back, just in case.

  He waited for the fax machine to beep that it was done receiving, then he took the papers that had arrived, spread himself across both seats, nestled into the kid-soft leather until he was entirely comfortable, and began to read. Pennsylvania was disappearing beneath him.

  TOP SECRET

  NATIONAL COUNTERINTELLIGENCE ALERT

  SUBJECT: NCIA-235

  HANDLE VIA COMINT CHANNELS

  (DELETION)

  SUBMITTED BY

  _______________________________________________

  DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

  CONCURRED IN BY THE

  UNITED STATES INTELLIGENCE BOARD

  AS INDICATED OVERLEAF

  25 JUNE 2001

  AUTHENTICATED:

  ______________________________

  EXECUTIVE SECRETARY, USIB

  SANITIZED FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT USE

  E.O. 12356, SEC. 3.4

  NIJ 00-320

  BY ___, NARA, DATE 6-25-01

  PAGES 12

  COPY NO. 4

  BACKGROUND

  (TS)—deleted (S)—Per CEC tasking, subject NCIA-235 was put under discreet physical and technical surveillance commencing 1 June 2001. In view of source sensitivities and specially compartmen
ted programs, surveillance was conducted by rather than CEC. There was no indication that subject detected surveillance or was surveillance conscious.

  SUMMARY OF FINANCIAL INVESTIGATION

  (S), conducted a full financial on subject, including data as recent as 18 June 2001. FBI, NSA, Treasury, and other cooperating agencies provided independent traces. Positively identified accounts included “premier” checking at Riggs, an equities account at Legg Mason Inc., and two credit card accounts: Visa Platinum and American Express. (See Appendix A for deposit, withdrawal, transfer, and spending records.) All account activity was within parameters of subject’s financial profile. (S) Forensic investigation conducted by was unable to positively tie subject to José Marco Cabrillo. Neither could cooperating agencies. However, there was a consensus that subject’s understanding of covert financial transactions would permit him to conceal financial ties to Cabrillo. Four Para 1 ref transfers to suspect Nauru account were referred to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which is currently conducting an audit for consideration of a possible criminal proceeding.

  What insufferable shit. He jumped ahead. “Summary of Physical Surveillance…On 23 June 2001 at 1230 subject boarded Amtrak Metroliner going to New York. Subject took a taxi from Newark to Terminal B at Newark Airport, where he met at 1717 hours with an unidentified male. They were engaged in conversation for approximately twenty minutes. Surveillance was able to identify UNSUB’s license plate number, which is currently being traced…”

  Blah. Blah. Blah. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. He flipped to “Recommendations.”

  Task to unilaterally monitor subject’s activities in Switzerland and other overseas locations.

  Inform the Government of Switzerland that the USG is in the process of considering criminal charges against subject.

  Request cooperative liaison services monitor subject’s activities in Switzerland, and in particular contact with hostile entities.

  Oh, sweet Mary mother of Jesus, did they understand nothing? The whole point was to get the SOB’s copy of the photo. And God knows what else he’s carrying around. Didn’t they see what he had in his safe? How he’d been showing that photo around Washington? Who could know what the fool might stumble across? Did no one think to call Immigrations or Customs and have him searched before he got on the plane to find out if he had it on him? How hard would that have been? He was already under investigation for narcotics! Now we’re going to have to do it in Europe.