Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  “She leaves the day after next at—” He lost his spot, fumbled again with the schedule, and found it once more. “Oh two hundred. An auto transport. Just show up.”

  “Who do I ask for when I get there?”

  “Ask for? Max, you don’t need to ask for anybody. The captain will be looking for you. He’ll have your cabin ready. I’ll greet you myself when the ship docks.”

  The final call was to Rikki, my daughter. Her fourteenth birthday was in three days. I was going to send her something nice from Zurich. No more. The phone rang eight times before her voice-mail greeting kicked in: a parade of barking dogs. I had no idea what it meant. I waited until they were through, then sang “Happy Birthday” into the phone in Arabic. The woman at the phone station next to mine looked at me as if she thought I might explode myself any moment.

  I headed for the elevators but, instead of waiting, raced down the stairs to the basement level again and through the same cafeteria where I’d almost been run over—the place was still a mess. The Algerian baggage handler I’d met there years before had shown me an employee exit at the back of the kitchen, up a small flight of stairs. The door wasn’t alarmed, just one sleepy security guard who nodded at me as I went through. Walk with enough authority and you can blow by half the security guards in the world.

  Outside, I headed straight for one of the employee bus stops. Eight of them were idling at the curb. I jumped on the one going to Vitry-sur-Seine just as it was starting to pull away. No one got on after me, the most positive note I’d had in a while.

  CHAPTER 17

  Vitry-sur-Seine, France

  I’D BEEN TO VITRY-SUR-SEINE BEFORE. It’s tucked into an industrial zone southeast of Paris, one of those innocuously named “cités” where the French hide the North African Muslims who do all the nation’s dirty work. We’d caught some “chatter” that Algerian fundamentalist groups were using a place called Carthage Voyages to pick up cash and make travel arrangements. The French busted it a couple times but the owners refused to talk. The French even tapped the phones and still got nothing. I’d gone out myself after hours to have a look, but the owners, whoever they were, seemed to be the model of discretion.

  When I got there this time, Carthage Voyages had yet to open, but at least it hadn’t moved or—by the looks of the tidy counter inside, packed with brochures—closed down. I crossed the road and ducked into a café full of Algerian and Moroccan workers in blue overalls, smoking their Galois and sipping triple espressos. If there was a word of French being spoken, I couldn’t hear it. I ordered my own triple, in Arabic, the closest I could come at the moment to belonging to anything, and settled myself at a table in the front window with a two-day-old copy of El Khabar, a mouthpiece of Algeria’s military dictatorship.

  I was still at it forty-five minutes later, working on a second espresso, when a woman in a burka stepped off a bus at the corner, seemed to glide down the street inside her shapeless tent, stopped to study the window displays at Carthage Voyages, then unlocked the door and began turning lights on. The clock over the coffee bar read exactly nine-thirty as I paid and left.

  “May I help you?” the woman asked when I entered. Like her expression, her tone of voice was unreadable.

  “I need a ride to Italy. Trieste.” (Never tell anyone where you’re really going if you don’t have to.)

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “Later?”

  She didn’t say anything—just picked up a phone, dialed a number, and spoke Berber-laced Arabic so rapid I could barely catch it.

  “Tomorrow morning, six A.M., here,” she said finally, a statement, not a question. She seemed used to people who had run out of other choices. Living among French infidels had also taught her not to cultivate curiosity.

  I said good-bye and wandered up the street, hunting for a sex shop. I was looking for a woman maybe six feet tall, something in an inflatable latex.

  CHAPTER 18

  IT WAS HARD TO TELL WHO LOOKED WORSE: me after a day of sitting in smoky dives, checking every exit and entrance to see if I was being watched, and a mostly sleepless night on a bench in the RER train station, or my driver. He’d been working since ten the night before, he said. The bags under his eyes spread out like pancakes. I offered to start out behind the wheel, but he shook his head. In fact, I never got a word out of him for the first four hours of the drive. He didn’t even offer me his name.

  Outside Lyon, he nearly swerved off the A-6, then cut the wheel back so sharply that we almost flipped. Turned out we’d both been asleep at the time.

  “Un café?” he asked, finally surrendering.

  I stood outside for five minutes waiting for the driver to reappear, trying to wake myself up, then went into the Courte Paille to look for him. He was asleep, head down on his crossed arms, at a little table off to the side. A sip or two remained in his espresso cup. A baguette, two-thirds eaten, teetered on the edge of the table by his elbow. My world being what it had become, I gave his shoulder a small shake, just to confirm that sleep was all we were dealing with. He groaned slightly, raised his head an inch or two, and let it collapse back on to his arms again.

  I took the wheel when we got in the car. He was too tired to protest. A hundred kilometers later, just as the road traversed a patch that looked down on a picture-postcard valley, my driver climbed into the backseat and began snoring uproariously.

  The day was gray but cloudless, perfect weather for losing myself in the Alps. I’d decided to find an obscure pensione somewhere, finally get a good meal, sleep, pay cash, use up the little time I likely had left on the Irish passport, lay low for another twenty-four hours, and find a new car and driver to cross the border and wind my way on down to La Spezia.

  By Bourg d’Oisans, the sky had begun to brighten. I stopped at a café tacked on to the side of a Total station for a coffee of my own without bothering to wake the driver. For all he cared or knew, I could have flown to the moon and back.

  The café was empty except for a couple sitting at a booth, picking at each other over their pastries. I bellied up to the bar—au zinc, as the French say—and ordered a café crème and a croissant. I was on the second jolt of caffeine when the door opened and a head popped in, took a quick look around, then followed its splendid nose inside. Definitely Gallic, but definitely out of place. Even the bickering couple stopped long enough to give him a once-over. He was wearing a bomber jacket zipped up practically to the neck. Nothing unusual there. The temperature was dropping as we climbed—it couldn’t have been more than forty-five degrees or so outside. Still, it was obvious that he had a tie and white shirt on underneath. This was the Alps. Summer or winter, you leave your office clothes at home. This guy had to be surveillance, and to butcher the old song, it had to be me.

  In one way, I wasn’t surprised. The French are good at this sort of thing. Unlike the FBI and the CIA, the French services work together: military intelligence, the national police, and the locals, all in one seamless operation, which means they have eyes and ears everywhere. All they had to do was canvass the airport with my photo, find the bus driver who took me to Vitry-sur-Seine, and hit the streets until they picked up my trail. The burka woman at Carthage Voyages wouldn’t rat out her fellow Algerians if the French pulled her nails out one by one, but I wasn’t worth a scratchy cuticle to her. Fair enough, but still, I had to wonder who mobilized the French. But that wasn’t my immediate concern; now there was no way I could drive into Italy without the French alerting the Italians and the Italians picking me up on the other side of the border.

  My driver was sitting behind the wheel, engine running, when I came out.

  “Take it slow up to La Grave,” I told him as I took his place in the backseat. “Real slow.”

  He didn’t ask why, but he did. The road doesn’t give you a lot of choice: It’s all switchbacks and steep ascent. But there’s slow and slower, and at maybe seventy klicks, we were easily the pokiest car on the mountainside. Drivers behind us were fl
ashing their lights. Some wagged their fingers as they passed us. I was looking for the car that didn’t seem to mind dawdling.

  My driver noticed them before I did: a pair of Renault 25’s, one charcoal gray and the other beige, hanging back behind us, going just as slow as we were. Fat, stubby antennas stuck out of the middle of the roofs of both cars.

  “How long?” I asked him.

  “Ever since we left the gas station.”

  The driver started to speed up, but I told him to slow back down. No point in irritating the French any more than I had to or giving them any reason to pull us over. For one thing, the Irish passport now was certainly worthless. Besides, I had work to do. I reached into the plastic bag I’d been hauling along ever since Paris, took out my latex sex kitten—sex Amazon, actually—unfolded her across the backseat, and started blowing. I’d just finished by the time we rounded the final bend. By then, the driver looked as if he was thinking about slamming on the brakes and making a run for it.

  Val d’Isère is a sight in any season. The Pissaillas glacier looms above the town, skiable through most of the summer. Below that stretches the vast Espace Killy, ten thousand hectares of some of the best bowls in the world, named for the French national hero who was nearly unbeatable on these slopes through all of the 1960s. I’d first come here just about the time Jean-Claude Killy’s career was on the downside—rock climbing in the Alps with some friends, back when the town of Val d’Isère was a real place. When I returned the next time, in 1992, just as the Winter Olympics were ending, the place had been torn down and rebuilt by a band of marauding Disney imagineers.

  I handed the driver five hundred-dollar bills, told him to slow to a baby crawl at the roundabout in the center of town, then ducked out between two tourist minibuses double-parked in front of Killy Sports. As I left the backseat, I sat the sex doll up in my place. I was standing in the recess between the minibuses when the two Renaults circled past me and took off after the cab, back in the direction of La Grave.

  Inside Killy Sports, the display counters had all been given over to summer sports—the whole resort had been turned into a sun-and-fun camp for the few who could afford it—but I convinced a surprised clerk to let me into the storeroom where they kept the skiing stuff. While she tapped her heel, I flew through the supplies, not bothering with prices: Gore-Tex pants, Gore-Tex jacket, Gore-Tex gloves, Gore-Tex socks, goggles, ski cap, backpack, high-energy bars, a compass, a vinyl map that seemed to show every knoll for twenty miles around. Amazingly enough, I found a beautiful, top-of-the-line pair of Finnish Karhu backcountry skis, Fritschi bindings, and synthetic skins. Run-of-the mill alpine skis weren’t going to work for the route I had in mind. There’d be as many ascents as descents. The free heel and skins would get me up most any slope. By the time I was through, I was out ten thousand francs plus—loose change by Val d’Isère standards.

  I must have caught the last lift up the glacier. The restaurant at the top was all but empty now—no wait for the pay phone. Frank Beckman, I was sure, had sent word to both Marc Rousset and Michelle Zwanzig that I was on my way. I had no intention of following up with either of them now. My life had gotten way too complicated for that, but I didn’t want them or anyone else sending out an APB because I hadn’t arrived. I would tell them I’d been delayed in Paris, family emergency, anything to buy some time. I started with Rousset. His cell phone was turned off. A digital voice answered Zwanzig’s phone. The number had been changed; no mention of what the new one might be. Weird. I was staring at her card right in front of me. Three days ago, Frank had assured me she was my route to his Saudi billionaire. I phoned Frank at home to see what was up. No answer. Or on his second line. Or his third one. Or on his cell. Rousset and Zwanzig I didn’t care about—that was a sidelight—but Frank’s disappearing gnawed at me. He was supposed to be my lifeline. And he was never out of touch.

  I looked at Frank’s home numbers again. All three were consecutive. I took a chance and dialed the next one in sequence. It was India’s private line.

  “What are you doing at home?” I asked. “Who’s looking after our national interests?”

  “I took the day off. Were you trying to get Dad? I think he’s already left.”

  There was something clipped about her voice, uneasy. I didn’t think it was me.

  “I tried his other numbers—thought I’d take a chance on—”

  “Where are you?”

  “The French Alps. A skiing holiday.”

  “June, Max. Été.”

  “The Pissaillas glacier. There’s supposedly some new snow.”

  “Right. Listen…”

  I didn’t like the edge in her voice.

  “Are you busy?”

  There was a long pause. It sounded as if she was pacing back and forth. I thought of that glimpse I’d had of her a few days earlier, behind the curtain in the room above the library—the princess trapped in a tower of gold.

  “Max, they’re after you.”

  “I know. But who?”

  “Not now. Not on the phone.”

  “Is it work?”

  There was another long pause—no pacing this time. I thought maybe we’d been cut off.

  “Some people were here last night to see Dad. He shushed me out of the room, but I could hear them through the air-conditioning vent in my bedroom.”

  Another vision: India, lying on her side, ear pressed to the metal grill.

  “What did they say?”

  She laughed just for a moment. “I heard Dad call you a well-hit three-wood in a tile bathroom.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s mad at you about something. I don’t know what it is.”

  “It must be the truth thing.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You’ve got to go someplace safe.” The laughter was gone, the strain back. Whatever she’d heard had been enough to scare her, for me, maybe for her father and even herself. I wanted to tell her that the only safe place I knew of was the one where I would be in the greatest danger, but why scare her more.

  “I will.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise. Listen, thanks.”

  She didn’t want to hang up. Sometimes you can feel it over a telephone line.

  “India—”

  “It’s okay. I’m fine.”

  “If you’re worried about something…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll talk when I get back.”

  “Good old Uncle Max, looking out for little India.” At least she sounded better. The tension was out of her voice.

  “That’s me, but you’re not so little. Got to go. I’ve got your number. I’ll call in a week.”

  “You don’t know how much this means to me,” Chris said when he answered, “not calling at two in the morning.”

  “That’s me. Thoughtful. Webber?”

  “Got it. But they gave me three months of calls. You want them all?”

  “Yeah, sure. Here, copy down this number.”

  I gave Chris an e-fax line secured with a PIN code. It ran off a spoof, or triple-eight server, meaning if someone was tapping Chris’s fax line, they wouldn’t be able to trace his fax to me.

  I was almost afraid to ask the next question, about Patricia, afraid to break my streak of luck.

  “Did you get her name?”

  “Joan Hanahan.”

  She’d lied to me. No surprise there.

  “I’ll bet she paid cash.” That’s what I would have done if it were me putting a surveillance team on an airplane.

  “No. She paid with a corporate credit card. Visa, I think. I’ve got the number here somewhere….”

  “Don’t need it. Just the name of the company.”

  I could hear Chris open a drawer and shuffle through it.

  “Applied Science Research.”

  That was sloppy. But after the circus in New York I wasn’t surprised.

  “Don’t you wanna kn
ow who owns Applied Science?” Chris asked. “Eight big pension funds. But here’s the strange thing. There’s also an outfit out of the Caymans. Its shares look like they’re protected by a half dozen dummy companies. It stinks.”

  “Who owns the Caymans company?”

  “I’ll dig around.”

  “Chris—”

  “I know. You love me.”

  “Who wouldn’t.”

  CHAPTER 19

  BACK OUTSIDE IT FELT like winter. Anyone in his right mind would have taken the lift back down to Val d’Isère. Not me. I stepped into my bindings, tightened up my pack, lowered my goggles, and pushed off down the glacier east toward Italy, Il Bel Paese.

  My goal was the Colle del Nivolet, the end of the paved road that winds up into the Italian Alps out of Turin. It didn’t look that tough when I planned the route: The Colle sits more than twelve hundred meters below Val d’Isère, less than ten miles away, across terrain I had traversed before. But I was almost thirty years younger then. Or maybe it was the round earth, flat-map syndrome. Or the fact that I was now running on fumes. Anyhow, by night, on skis, in my mid-forties, it was a miracle I made it.

  Melting and freezing, freezing and melting had left the top a slick of ice. I needed crampons and an axe more than skis. Clouds kept obscuring the moon. At one point I was sure I was about to slide down a five-hundred-foot chute on my back. It turned out to be only five feet, but it scared the hell out of me all the same. I went up and down at least three thousand feet, taking my skis on and off as the glaciers appeared and reappeared, until my quads were on fire. Then a small release sluiced me over a cornice. Fortunately, it wasn’t much of a drop. If there hadn’t been a moon and if I hadn’t been lucky, my frozen carcass would still be up there, lodged in a crevasse, waiting to be discovered a thousand years hence by some alien race with silicon chips for hearts.