That was good news and bad news. Good news: the place was ripe for plucking. And I was obviously the mean motherplucker to do the job right. Bad news: Lord B had flown. Why had he gone to France? What was he up to?
I formed the troops. I told them that Tommy and I were going to break into Brookfield House as soon as it got dark, and that Mick was coming along to make sure the proprieties were observed. I explained my reasons. I asked if anyone had any questions or suggestions.
Nasty Nicky Grundle, self-appointed enlisted SEAL ombudsman and shop steward, had a few: “C’mon, Skipper—how come you fucking officers get to have all the fun?”
Then he suggested there’d be a job action if the platoon wasn’t included. When that didn’t work, he hinted about mutiny. I was having none of it. Then he threatened to hide my Bombay.
I relented. After all, I’m a reasonable guy.
Breaking and entering has never been one of my strong points. I’ve always been a blow-the-fucking-door-off-its-hinges-and-storm-the-place kind of guy. But once in a while during a mission, slightly more finesse may be necessary. That’s why as the FIG—Frog In Command—of SEAL Team Six I sent a dozen or so of my more feloniously inclined tadpoles to locksmith school, where—aside from picklock 101—they learned the basic intricacies of deciphering cipher locks, tumbling safe tumblers, and unbolting dead bolts.
At Red Cell, where our mission included breaking into the nation’s most sensitive installations, I took my men’s unconventional talents a step further, having the rudiments of bypassing electronic burglar-alarm systems inculcated in them by a guy Stevie Wonder went to junior high with back in Jackson Heights. The DIQ’s—that’s Dude In Question’s—name is—well, I’ll just call him Eddie the Burglar.
Eddie is a five-foot-five Irishman sporting the same kind of shiny black pompadour Desi Arnaz used to wear. He weighs in somewhere just below 120 pounds—in fact, if he wanted to, he could buy his clothes in the boys’ department of most stores. Eddie works only twenty-five days a year. For twenty-four of them he plans to steal things—truckloads of furs and cases of unset diamonds are his most common targets. On the twenty-fifth, he pulls it off. He’s always worked alone—which means he’s never been caught, never been fingered, and never had to split the take. Over the past seventeen years, he’s cleared roughly a quarter mil a year, tax free, which has bought him a lovely place in Bimini, a fifty-three-foot Hatteras, and a devoted Italian Catholic wife eleven years younger than he, who has no idea what he does for a living.
The minute Wonder told me about his friend, I knew I wanted to hire him. He’d be the perfect guy to teach Red Cell how to evade sophisticated electronic alarm systems—like the ones at nuclear-weapons stowage facilities that use infrared and sonar, the laser-based systems aboard boomer-class nuclear subs, or the passive magnet or movement-sensitive devices used by most defense contractors.
We met in a bar out on Long Island. I offered him $15,000 of your tax dollars to give us a one-week course on breaking and entering.
Eddie turned me down cold. “Fifteen grand? Whaddya, whaddya?” He popped his chewing gum and sucked on a Camel. “Whaddya? Crazy?”
I didn’t think so.
He did. “Whaddya? Offering me friggin’ money? Whaddya, whaddya? It’s my friggin’ patriotic duty.”
As we worked our way around Brookfield House for a preliminary recon, I said a silent prayer of gratitude to Eddie the Burglar. Wonder’s diagrams indicated three overt security arrangements. There was a narrow, almost undiscernible strip of foil tape around the perimeter of the ornate ground-floor casement windows—break the current by shattering a window and an alarm goes off. The window frames were also alarmed with magnets. Open the window and you set off the alarm. Ditto the first floor. The second-floor windows, twenty-five feet off the ground and six feet below the roof ridge, had neither tape nor magnets.
The service-entrance door was reinforced by a heavy steel-grate security gate. The windows of the kitchen, pantry, and servants quarters were covered by stout bars set into the window frames. All of Brookfield House’s doors probably had either electronic contacts—open them and the alarm goes off—or pressure plates next to the hinges.
We drove to London, put the cars in an anonymous garage near Victoria Station, and took the underground to Belsize, where we checked into an anonymous-looking motel. Then we walked up to Hampstead, watching each other’s backs. There were eight of us in all. Tommy, Mick, Wonder, and me to commit the felonies; Nasty, Duck Foot, Carlosito, and Rodent to provide perimeter security while we did.
We’d traveled light. Wonder brought his prized set of Bay Ridge lockpicks. I’d handed out eight minitransceivers—secure, scrambled radio sets no bigger than Walkmans. They attach to your belt. You wear a receiver in your ear and speak over a wire mike. The batteries last for just over six hours, and the whole apparatus weighs less than half a pound. We also carried mini flashlights, a Minox camera, surgical gloves, two twenty-foot lengths of nylon climbing rope, and appropriate weapons. The entry team each had a rucksack in case anybody wanted to take souvenirs. I guess we looked like your everyday tourists—if your everyday tourists resemble a rugby team.
Mick, Wonder, and I were the first to arrive on-scene. We’d picked the Freemasons, an old pub less than a hundred yards from Brookfield House, as our rendezvous. We found seats by the bay windows and sipped pints of Guinness until everyone else arrived.
Eddie’s philosophy of burglary was very much like my SpecWar doctrine. He Kept It Simple, Stupid. And he almost always went in through the “back door.” “Go where they least expect you,” he preached, sounding a lot like a good SEAL master chief.
Eddie had a willing congregation, so far as I was concerned. When, as a green ensign, I took Bravo Squad down the My Tho River to Ilo-Ilo Island in Vietnam, we didn’t hit Mr. Charlie by walking up the canal from the west—the way he expected us to come a-calling.
Instead, we came in through the eastern “back door”: a tortuous long haul through hip-deep mud, complete with bramble bushes as sharp as any barbed wire, poisonous snakes, booby traps, and other miscellaneous deadly obstacles. But, when we hit Mr. Victor Charlie, he was looking the other way, which meant we were able to kill lots of him before he realized what was happening. At the time, my little day trip to Ilo-Ilo was called the most successful SEAL operation in the Mekong Delta—ever.
Well, Eddie the Burglar, like any good unconventional warrior, also made a habit of hitting where he was least expected, even though it could mean more work initially. On buildings, he explained, that meant coming in through the roof.
The roof may be difficult to get to, but it is commonly the least protected element of a structure. You can cut a roof and not set off an alarm. Moreover, it’s harder for a security guard to see someone working six or eight stories off the ground. After all, as Eddie told us, most people never look above eye level.
So up we went. You know what’s wonderful about English housing? The drainpipes. Brits build their houses using solid, well-wrought, securely fastened cast-iron drainpipes that are as easy to climb as a stepladder. Brookfield House, which was a semidetached structure, had one four-inch, cast-iron drainpipe running up the front, and another running up the rear.
I posted my sentries. Duck Foot by the Freemasons, Carlos under the eaves of St. John’s Church, Nasty close by the police station up at the corner of Hampstead High Street, and Rodent in the rear of Brookfield House to cover our six.
No sense in attracting attention to ourselves. We cut round the back and scampered up like monkeys after bananas, rolling over the ornate cresting. The canted, slate roof afforded us moderate cover. I crept over to the chimney and checked to see whether it was hot. It wasn’t—which suggested to me heat had been turned down inside. We donned our surgical gloves.
There was no way to go down from the roof without cutting through it. But six feet below the crest was a single window. Mick and I each took one of Wonder’s feet, and we suspended him
upside down while he double-checked to make sure it hadn’t been alarmed.
“Nah. This one’s nonsecure.” He opened it and pulled himself inside. “C’mon down—the water’s fine.”
Tommy tied two of the lines together, secured them to the chimney, and dropped them off the roof. Then, one by one, we clambered down and pulled ourselves inside.
“We’re in,” I whispered to my sentries. It was easy—almost too easy. But I’ve always been willing to take yes for an answer.
“Check,” said Carlos. “It’s quiet out here.”
“Good.” We were inside what must have been a servant’s room. It was small—not more than eight by ten. It had a narrow iron-framed bed whose mattress sagged noticeably, a bedside table, a rocking chair, and a small dresser. A small, threadbare prayer rug sat atop old linoleum at the foot of the bed.
I cracked the door. “Let’s move.”
We made our way down a steep, creaky stairway. I didn’t like the noise we were making at all. We passed the second floor and made our way down the worn, wood steps. At the first-floor landing, I stopped in front of a small butler’s table. Atop it sat a tray holding several glasses. I wiped one with a finger, leaving a swath in the dust.
“No one’s been here for a while.”
I opened the door in front of me. Remember the old TV show Upstairs, Downstairs? Well, we’d been downstairs. Now it was time to see how the other half lived. We came out into an ornately painted drawing room. The furniture was Regency. The rugs were Aubusson. The walls were painted rich red, trimmed in white and gold. From one, a Gobelin tapestry looked down on the room. Another held a huge Old Master hunt scene. There was Venetian glass and Tuscan brass. A huge pair of candelabra flanked a striped sofa.
But it was the chest of drawers below the Gobelin that blew me away. Eight feet long, six feet high, and entirely covered in mother-of-pearl inlay, the intricate pattern set into dark wood.
Tommy’s jaw dropped in awe. “That’s an antique Syrian wedding chest,” he said reverently. “Must be three hundred years old. The only time I’ve ever seen one similar, I was in a museum in Damascus—and this one’s nicer.”
The other public rooms were as richly and ornately decorated as the one in which we stood. But we hadn’t come as sight-seers. There was work to be done.
Tommy took living room, drawing room, and library. Wonder slipped down to the basement to recon the kitchen, pantry, and wine cellar. Mike and I worked Brookfield’s private study, hidden behind a trompe l’oeil doorway on the second floor, just off his bedroom.
It’s hard to search when you don’t know what you’re looking for. I examined the books on Lord B’s bedside table. There was a Koran and a King James Version Bible. The only other books were Rogue Warrior and Rogue Warrior: Red Cell. I flipped through them. He’d highlighted some passages and underlined others. Probably trying to get a better grip on who I was. Know thy enemy and all that crap. I slid my hand between his mattresses to see if he’d left any papers there. Nope.
“Wonder?” I’d sent Wonder to locate and double-check the security system. We didn’t want any pressure plates or motion detectors going off.
“Yo.” His voice was loud and clear in my earpiece.
“Anything?”
“All clear. This is a nuts-and-bolts system. Lord B was probably trying to save a few pennies when he put it in. On the other hand, if I knew anything about wine, I think I’d be impressed. You ever hear of anything called Château Pétrus?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither. But this guy’s got hundreds of bottles of it.
Old stuff, too—1955, 1961, 1966.”
“Tommy—”
“All clear here, Skipper. Nothing suspicious.” There was a pause. “Hey, Wonder—”
“Yeah?”
“Did you say Château Pétrus?”
“Yup.”
“Well, it costs up to about a grand a bottle, depending on the year.”
Wonder, normally unflappable, was flapped. “You’re shitting me.”
We didn’t need chatter right now. We needed results. “Hey, assholes—back to work.” I flipped the antique silk carpets to see if he had a cache beneath them. Nothing.
I eased pictures away from the walls to see if he had a safe. Nada.
I turned to watch Mick searching the bookcase. “Find anything?”
He shook his head in frustration. “Nah—it’s all clean so far.”
“There’s got to be something here.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because.”
“That’s no reason, Dick.”
“Listen—the guy’s dirty. I know he’s dirty. I feel it.”
“Feelings don’t prove anything.”
I shook my head in frustration. “I know—I know.”
We finished the bedroom and began a systematic search of Brookfield’s study. I photographed his ornate, tooled leather address book, page by page. Maybe something would turn up. I picked the lock on the sole drawer of his eighteenth-century writing table. It was empty. I started to close it, then remembered my own commandment: Thou shalt never assume. I slid the drawer out and turned it over— sometimes people tape documents to the bottom of drawers. Brookfield was not one of them. Then I ran my hand all the way inside the empty space. Wedged way back between the dust panel and drawer was what felt like a business card. I extracted it between my fingers and examined it. It was indeed a business card—a triple-weight chip of vellum from a travel agency on Bruton Street, in Mayfair. The engraved script read Doreen Sims. The card went into my pocket.
Nasty’s voice in my ear. “Security wagon turned off High Street.”
“Lights out.” We extinguished our flashlights. “Keep away from the windows.”
Carlos whispered, “They’re cruising past the church. All quiet.”
There was a pause. “They’ve stopped in front of the house.”
Inside, we held our collective breath. My sphincter tightened.
“Checking the door.”
We waited.
“Walking to the rear.”
No one moved.
Now Rodent’s voice came into my brain. “Back-door check.” Christ—the guy must have walked right over Rodent, who’d concealed himself in the bushes next to the servants’ entrance.
Carlos’s voice: “Second man out.”
Christ, what the hell was going on. “Sitrep?” I whispered.
“Cigarette break,” Carlos answered. “Leaning up against the van like James Dean.”
I stopped sweating.
“First man’s clear,” said Rodent, obvious relief in his voice.
“They’re both leaning against the van smoking.”
“C-o-o-o-l.” That was Grundle’s voice. “Are they making smoke rings?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
We waited in the half-light. Finally, Carlos gave us an all clear.
Rodent sighed loudly. “The SOB walked across my left hand.”
“Lucky you—since you jerk off rightie,” Duck Foot chortled.
“Fuck you.”
“Hey, hey, hey—this is serious, guys. Let’s maintain op sec.”
Duck Foot’s voice was five by five in my earpiece. “Anything you say, Skipper.” Then he laughed like crazy.
We were out and clear half an hour later, back in the Freemasons, quaffing pints. Duck Foot was six up on us—and feeling no pain—by the time we arrived.
Other than the address book and the business card, the house had been squeaky-clean. At least we hadn’t discovered anything. I had three quadruple gins in quick succession, but even they didn’t improve my mood. I was disappointed. Frustrated. Perplexed. Indeed, I’d hoped for results. We’d achieved nothing other than discovering Lord B lived in a spotless home, had bought both my books, and used a Mayfair travel agency.
Given the fact that I believed Lord B to be a terrorist, or at least a terrorist sympathizer, that was unusual. Tangos and those around them te
nd to leave paperwork around. From the days of Mao’s Long March to Fidel’s sojourn in the Sierra Maestra to Che Guevara’s campaign in Bolivia, everybody kept diaries, journals, notebooks, and other written records. In El Salvador, the FMLN guerrillas walked around with tons of records in their knapsacks. As Ed Corr, one of our better U.S. ambassadors in San Salvador, used to say about them, “When they’re not fighting, they’re writing.”
So the bareness of Lord B’s house was disappointing. And we’d been thorough. Tommy knows all about antiques. He can find a secret compartment if it exists. There was none, anywhere. Stevie had worked all the walls, looking for hidden passageways, document caches, and safes. There were none. Mick checked the floors, the ceilings—even the wiring. He found nothing out of the ordinary.
This total lack of evidence spoke eloquently in favor of noninvolvement on Brookfield’s part, an opinion Mick wasn’t hesitant about expressing. But something was missing from the picture. Why? Because my gut told me he was dirty. And my gut is seldom wrong.
Then it hit me. The house was clean, because it was supposed to be clean. We’d broken in with no trouble because Brookfield wanted me to break in easily. He wanted me to scour the place top to bottom and come up empty. He even wanted me to be able to operate without Mr. Murphy along for the ride.
Of course. Brookfield House was squeaky-clean because Lord B knew I’d come visiting.
That was my style. How did he know it was my style? Because, gentle reader, he’d read Rogue Warrior; he’d read Rogue Warrior: Red Cell. He knew I made a habit of breaking into places.
So he’d left me only what he’d wanted me to see. The address book. The business card was probably the single piece of real intelligence I’d gleaned—and even that was now suspect because it was the only thing I’d “accidentally” discovered.
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