Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  “We don’t think it’s a coincidence,” he said. “We have in our possession evidence that you subsequently received payments from the Cabrillo family.”

  The idea, I assumed, was to throw me off balance. Why else come up with this nonsense? But I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. Instead, I put on my best you’re-all-idiots face.

  “We have established a correlation between TDYs you made to Geneva in 1991 and transfers made to a foreign account by a member of the Cabrillo family. Four visits, four transfers. A nice match, wouldn’t you say?”

  It was unadulterated crap. No one from the Cabrillo family had ever sent me a penny. Nor do I own, manage, or have access to the proceeds of a secret foreign account. Sure, I oversaw a lot of clandestine accounts, but they belonged to the Agency. And the money always went out. It never came back the other way.

  “Let me see the statements. The only bank account I have is at Riggs in Georgetown.”

  Scott looked over at Webber, who nodded again. That’s when it occurred to me: They were taping this—audio, not video. Bifocals would have the starring role. Webber might never have been in the room at all.

  “The money was wired from Geneva to what we believe is a life-raft account in Nauru, a numbered account,” Scott said with his best Dragnet menace. “We’re verifying it’s yours. We will, though.”

  I think it must have been the “though” that finally pissed me off enough to draw me out from cover. There was something so officious about it, so unctuous, so dead certain that I wanted to shove my fingers up Scott’s nostrils, hoist him out of his chair, and snap his neck.

  “This has got to be a joke,” I said, trying to calm down. “Listen to yourselves: You’re telling me that you’ve pulled my badge, one, because of trips I made to Geneva that just happened to coincide with transfers to an account you’re not sure who owns and, two, because I ate lunch in the same restaurant at the same time as a now-dead narcotics dealer.”

  I knew exactly what was going on. Ames’s arrest had set Congress’s hair on fire. The burning hair begat the Counter-Espionage Center (CEC, as it’s known in the Agency), funded to the grotesque tune of $300 million so the Agency could go through the motions of cleaning up its act. The money and the center and the nearly thousand people who worked there, deconstructing and reassembling old leads, begat the bullshit charges, and the bullshit charges begat today’s meeting. It was like some miserably updated version of Genesis: the Langley Bible. The Russians thought they could use Ames to steal the crown jewels, but he’d done a lot more damage by conning us into slitting our own throats in the aftermath.

  Their dot connecting, or matrices, or whatever the CEC called it these days had yet to catch a spy. Ames, Nicholson, Pitts, and all the other turncoats were hauled in the old-fashioned way, by recruiting spies in our enemies’ intelligence services: messy human beings who knew messy human secrets. Still, they couldn’t have been more pleased with themselves. It was all so much more tidy and cost effective than running spies. Webber would never have to explain to the House Intelligence Committee why he happened to have on his payroll a Hizballah shooter who sent a bullet into his pregnant sister’s face at point-blank range. The dot connecting had reduced the shock factor almost to zero, but all they’d accomplished thus far was to destroy a lot of careers. Mine, too, apparently, although at this point my career needed only a gentle shove to go careening over the edge.

  “And you’re stacking these flimsy leads up against twenty-five years of service to this organization?”

  Silence. I’d hit a nerve.

  I flipped the black-and-white glossy back across the table, unfortunately with a little too much force. It skimmed the table like a Frisbee, rising and hitting Scott in the middle of his paunch, which was draped over the table.

  “There’s more,” Scott said, undeterred.

  “More?”

  He picked up a yellow legal pad from the table, licked his finger, and flipped a page with it.

  “Theodore Hew-Chatworth.”

  “Harold—”

  “Harold what?”

  “He was born Harold Pooters. Theodore Hew-Chatworth came later.”

  Scott looked up and gave me a hard stare.

  “Suspected heroin dealer,” he read. “Probable contacts to Cabrillo family. Mr. Waller”—the “Mr.” was drawn out for effect—“managed to find time in his busy Manhattan schedule to pay Mr. Hew-Chatworth a visit.”

  “I was borrowing his phone.”

  “And then there’s Mr. Mohammad—”

  “Jamal?”

  “Offshore accounts. Jamal’s real talent. Stopping by for a little tutoring?”

  Shut up, I told myself. Say nothing. Definitely not the time to kick the dog.

  “And—”

  And? It was Jim’s turn to take over the show.

  “And,” he began in a thin, stuttery voice. “And we have reason to believe that Mr. Cabrillo’s Afghan heroin trafficking ran through the Fergana Valley, through a place called Osh.”

  “There’s a surprise,” I said, completely missing where this was all going.

  Scott almost jumped out of his chair to shut me up this time.

  “You’ll have your chance, Waller!” And then in a much softer voice to Jim: “Could you be more specific?”

  “Of course. Specifically, we believe the Cabrillo family, an Afghan heroin cartel, and a smuggling network in Osh”—he turned the page of a pocket notebook and studied an entry—“were assisted by a Russian major based in the Pamirs.”

  Ah, now I could see where this segment was headed. In the early nineties I’d been detained driving through the Pamirs: the raw edge of the crumbling periphery, as we used to call it, wall to wall with Islamic rebels, drug cartels, and rogue Russian military units. One of the Russian units had stopped my wheezing Neva outside of Osh and found a CZ nine-millimeter semiautomatic tucked behind the radio. Before I could talk the major who led the unit into letting me go, Moscow sent Jim to spring me. That was it: the sum total of the story until this moment.

  “And what might be the significance of that?” Mary Beth asked in a stage voice.

  “Well…” Whoever was sitting just in front of Jim seemed to dig an elbow into his knee. “Mr. Waller’s trip through the Pamirs, we believe, was tied to a narcotics deal.”

  To his credit, Jim looked green at the gills as he spoke. I’d actually come to like him on our flight back from Bishkek. His first child, a girl, had cystic fibrosis. I knew the stakes. He needed a promotion, a fact I was sure hadn’t been lost on Webber.

  “Is there more?” Mary Beth prompted. “Anything else you feel might be pertinent to our line of inquiry?”

  “Well…” That same stall, even more painful now. “During the damage assessment, Mr. Waller was, um, unclear about his connections with the Russian major and how he was able to get himself released.”

  A lie, of course. Jim knew exactly what had happened. He’d spent the night guzzling vodka with me and the major. It was in the morning, too hung over to care, that the major set me free.

  I found myself looking from face to face, trying to figure if everyone around the table was in on it. Probably not. I knew Rosetti would eat a bowl of wriggling intestinal worms before he’d stake his squeaky clean on this assembly. For the first time I was confused. Now it really was time to back off.

  “So what’s next?” I asked.

  “A polygraph,” Mary Beth said, now back to her normal low simmer. “It’ll put us on the road to clearing this up”—in the same way, I suppose, that removing a brain puts us on the road to clearing up brain cancer.

  “Fine,” I said, “I’ll take a polygraph. I’ll take as many as you like. And you have my permission to go through my stuff, here, at home.”

  “Our people are going through your office right now,” Scott shot back, feeling at last that he had the upper hand. “I understand you’ll have some explaining to do.”

  Knowing security was ransacking my o
ffice on a sunny Friday morning in front of everyone who worked for me wasn’t exactly reassuring. I made a quick mental inventory of what they would find in my safe: the three spiral notebooks from Beirut and some other notes I’d collected on Mousavi, Iran, and Buckley’s kidnapping. So what? It was a security violation at worst, definitely not a firing offense. Better to worry about where all this was headed, not what was already happening.

  For a start, the public ransacking was loaded with meaning. The seventh floor clearly intended to make the break between me and the Agency as visible as possible—a warning to anyone inclined to help me. The ransacking also told me that the entire system was about to come down on my head, and there was no point in my resisting. If I was going to have any chance of surviving, I absolutely needed to find out one last thing before I was escorted to the front gate. I’d have to kick the dog after all.

  “Maggie,” I said, drawing the nickname out as long as I dared, “do you know how much the Gobi desert grew in the last five years?”

  “What?” She knew she was being set up and didn’t like it.

  “Twenty thousand square miles. You know how we know that? We compared the satellite photography from 1994 and 1999.”

  “Waller…”

  “It’s only one hundred and fifty miles from Beijing today.”

  She was gripping the table. “If you think we’re here to listen to your—”

  “Maggie, I’m talking about an unchallengeable proposition. Facts. That’s supposedly what we trade in. So, why are we pussy-footing around here? Do a financial on me, sift through my credit-card bills, decree one more background investigation, or whatever it is you do to ferret out bad apples. But with the evidence you showed me today, you’ve got shit.”

  Mary Beth leaned forward over the conference table and pointed her finger at me just the way my maternal grandfather used to when he lectured me on the sanctity of preserving principal. Just like Mother’s sainted dad, she also called me by my last name while she delivered her lecture.

  “Hear…me…well…Waller. When you walked in this room, you had everyone’s sympathy. Now it’s gone. And don’t count on getting any from the Bureau, either. The mood they’re in, they’re going to ram a proctoscope up your ass and bolt it in place. I’m through here.” She picked up her stack of traffic and walked out.

  I still had no idea what shit storm I’d wandered into, but now at least I knew the FBI had been called in, which meant that I was the subject not just of a public humiliation but also of a criminal investigation. I’d worked enough with the Bureau to know they weren’t going to buy a flimsy case like this. Cabrillo and the narco charges were for internal consumption, a way to get me out of the building while they investigated me for something else. But what?

  We all sat there saying nothing until Webber unfolded himself from the far end of the table, waved his slender pimp hand in a little dismissive circle, and started down my way.

  “Let me have a minute with Max,” he said in a whisper, taking me by the elbow out into the hall.

  Webber’s breath smelled of cardamom and some other herb I couldn’t identify. Maybe he was using organic toothpaste these days. I wondered what would happen if I ripped his tongue out of his mouth.

  “Vince, tell me what just went on in there,” I said, forcing a laugh. “Where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be mirrors.”

  He didn’t even smile.

  “You already know,” he said. “Your name was bound to come across someone’s screen eventually.”

  The Rick Ames Doctrine again.

  “I know you’re not on anyone’s payroll,” he continued, even though he must have seen I’d lost interest. “And if the same lead had come across my desk five years ago, I would have dismissed it right away. I can’t today. After Ames, Congress is calling the shots. But listen, Max, the Bureau is going to come to the same conclusions. You know that. They’re gonna lose interest, drop the case. I’m going to ride this one, make sure it happens as fast as possible. Just don’t go stepping on any more toes, especially Mary Beth’s.”

  Did Webber really think he was going to sweet-talk me out the front door, make me go away and die without a fight?

  Webber suddenly pulled his head back with his shark’s grin and nudged me in the ribs.

  “Hey, Maggie sounds like a spurned woman. Anything you want to tell me?”

  “How do I get in touch with you?” I asked, ignoring him. “Give me your cell number.”

  Webber looked at me for a beat, no doubt wondering what I was up to.

  “You know, for an update. Sudden revelations. No crank calls. Promise.”

  Webber paused for another beat and then pulled out a yellow sticky pad, wrote down a number, and handed it to me.

  “No one has it,” he assured me. “Call me in two weeks and I’m sure I’ll have something for you.”

  “Do you ever wonder what happened to them, Vince?” I asked as I stuffed the paper in my wallet.

  “Them?”

  “The compromised networks in Iran.”

  “Dead, I suppose.” He sounded as he if were talking about fish bait. “It’s a nasty business, Max.”

  “But we don’t have to make it so easy for them.”

  The shark’s grin never left Webber’s face as he crooked his manicured finger and summoned the faux-Armanis from down the hall to come collect me.

  It was only then, as I walked away, that I realized I had been wrong about the matrices. I was being framed, plain and simple. No one was connecting dots; they were spitting them out like rivets to make a case against me. That’s what the circus in New York had been about: goad me, see where I ran, work it all into the story line. Smart as hell, really.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE POLYGRAPH WAS THE PAS DE DEUX I knew it would be, with me doing the heavy lifting. Assured I was guilty as charged, the operator tweaked his settings accordingly. Just as I had been trained by some of our same in-house necromancers, I declined to react to any of the dozen or so questions posed, and so the stylus did nothing, a flat line. (Strangely, or perhaps not, my Beirut spiral notebooks never came up. What better time to raise the subject than when I was wired to a chair?) By any objective standard, our session finished in a draw, but Langley follows low-rent Vegas rules: In the event of a toss-up, house wins. In my now-fat security file, the results would be entered as “inconclusive.” Unofficially, “inconclusive” nicely cemented my new pariah status.

  Afterward, the Armani twins sped me out in an unmarked Jeep Cherokee to my little off-campus office park near Tysons Corner. The door to my office was yellow-taped: Do not cross. Crime scene. No one was inside, but I could see from the mess that they’d left nothing untouched. The safe drawers were pulled open, the files stacked on the floor, next to three reinforced cardboard moving boxes, all ready to be carted off somewhere: forensics, counterintelligence, the seventh floor. Maybe to the Washington Post for all I knew.

  The Armanis were doing wing duty for me: one by either arm. I could see them taking my measure, probably wishing they could handcuff me. Behind them, the twenty or so annuitants who worked under me had formed two lines, a cordon for my perp walk. Their cardigans and pipe-stained teeth, eerily dated bouffants and comfortable footwear gave the scene an almost comic element, as if Mr. Rogers had been a spy all along. I’d spent a year shepherding this herd of broken pensioners, making sure their contracts got renewed so they could pay for their prescription medicines. Now not one of them would make eye contact with me.

  “We will need you to inventory your personal effects,” the Armani on my right said. He seemed to be reading off some mental index card he’d memorized in Security 101.

  I sifted silently through the boxes: a hash pipe from Yemen, the Baluch prayer rug I’d been dragging around the world ever since my sainted mother had left me there, all the other cheap souvenirs you pick up overseas and put around your office to create the illusion that your Washington servitude is only temporary. At the bottom was a f
ramed photo of my daughter, mugging it up with an Auguste Rodin sculpture in the garden at the Hirshhorn. I’d taken it during her two-week visit the summer before, the best time together I think we’d ever had. Rikki was a teenager now, funny, ironic like her mother. I had no idea what had happened to the sullen little girl with braces all over her teeth, but she was gone, magically replaced. At night—Rikki in my bed, I on the sofa—we’d chatter like schoolgirls before falling asleep. I’d never done that with anyone. It was like a half-month-long pajama party.

  “It’s not all here,” I said, getting back to my feet. “I had a couple things in my safe. Mind if I look?”

  They whispered to each other, seemed about to call for permission, then must have figured, Oh, what the hell.

  “Okay,” one of them said, “but make it quick.”

  I went right to the bottom drawer, at the back, where I’d kept the spiral notebooks and my files on Buckley and Mousavi. Gone. Everything else was there except them. Webber was probably looking at them at that very minute, searching for the phantom connection to the phantom narcotics network.

  “I must have made a mistake,” I said as I stood up.

  The other Armani had produced a clipboard from somewhere, a form for me to sign, acknowledging that I had done whatever I had just done. The pen was chained to the board, I suppose so I wouldn’t be tempted to steal it as my last criminal act inside the place.

  The final station of the cross was waiting back at headquarters. I had to be “read out” of the clearances I’d been “read into” over the years—Special Compartmented Intelligence, a nuclear Q Clearance, Talent-Keyhole, one or two others. I’d even forgotten I still had a Q Clearance, but never mind. The industrial-strength matron in charge of last rites dutifully ran through the criminal penalties for talking about this stuff to the unwashed, but I didn’t need to hear it. Everyone knew that if you crossed any of the bright red lines laid out in the 1947 National Security Act, you’d win yourself a one-way ticket to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, all expenses paid, and spend the rest of your life on a concrete bed in a 7'1"-by-12'1" cell.