Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  But what can you expect from people who aren’t familiar with the English language. “Was able”? “Was observed”? “Was interviewed”? Where did people learn constructions like that? Moron school? And the evasions, the words that weren’t words, the people who weren’t people, the blackouts and whiteouts, things said and unsaid. “Subject NCIA-235,” for crissake? What world, what parallel universe did they all live in?

  Channing dropped the pages on the coffee table—more bird’s-eye maple, pretentiousness itself—opened his eyes again, and found Jesse hovering over him with a tray: blood oranges, peeled and sectioned; sprigs of fresh mint; a Coke chilled in a crystal glass. He counted the ice cubes: one, two, three, four. He nodded to the table, waited until he had put the tray down, then raised his eyes to the partition.

  “Vanish.” But Jesse already had. He was rolling up points by the minute.

  One thing was clear: His little company couldn’t do surveillance worth shit. Gordon’s florid nose disgusted him. So did his sagging paunch. Who had brought him on? “Find out,” he wrote, then added: “FLAY THE IMBECILE.” Applied Science was done. “Call Berch,” he wrote in the margins.

  Waller’s networks bothered him. The “UNSUB” at Newark Airport was a mess, an unknown. “Need trace the Regal immediately!” he wrote. “Don’t care if you have to break into car and steal registration.” A cop? He had a vision of Waller’s Rolodex: hundreds of names and numbers, all of them coded in variations of some tongue seventeen people on earth still bothered to speak regularly. That he could admire.

  Why, then, would Waller go to Frank Beckman, the sluttiest slut in the oil business? I could rent him for pennies. Waller had to know about him. Surely, he wouldn’t trust anything Beckman had to say. Beckman at least he knew he could find a way to handle: Push a little business his way, make him a little more money so he could add to his nouveau riche I-have-arrived! art collection, and the man would do anything he was asked. Linear motivation—so refreshing. Waller was another matter. Everyone has buttons to punch, strings to play. What were his?

  Bloomberg quotes streamed across the top of the flat screen built into the paneling opposite him: sweet, crude, bunker; Nigeria, Caspian, Persian Gulf. Below them, the world passed by in CNN’s banner shorthand: suicide bombers in Tel Aviv, retaliatory strikes in Gaza. Jihads brewing in the East, muscles flexing in the West. That was the beauty of this planet: its synergies, its predictabilities. For every action, an equal and opposite reaction. Jews killed Arabs. Arabs killed Jews. With each new death, the world improved, and the price of a barrel of oil climbed, climbed, climbed. Go long all the way. When you made the history, there was no guesswork involved.

  For centuries, adventurers had searched for the philosopher’s stone: the magic substance that would turn base metal to gold. He’d found it. From now on, G5’s for him, graves for the rest. Comedy and tragedy. Survival of the fittest.

  Channing scanned his notes one last time, committed them to memory, and fed the fax pages into a shredder tastefully concealed in the base of the coffee table. There was nothing you couldn’t have in this world if you dreamed that it was yours. Then he called Jesse and handed him the little box of paper shreds.

  “Destroy.”

  The man looked wide-eyed, nodded his head: Yes! Yes! And disappeared again behind his bulkhead. No wonder he liked him.

  “Nils,” he barked into the intercom, “are you fucking my wife?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  Not yet? Ha! Maybe he’d give him the damn G5 when he was sick of it. Nils could fit it with bomb bays and wing cannons—strafe the bastards, pound ’em back into the Stone Age, whoever the bastards were, which was just about everyone.

  CHAPTER 13

  DANK WITH THE COUGHS, snuffles, and sweat of the pre-loaded, Flight 19 smelled like a locker room, and it wasn’t even off the ground. Half a dozen brats bawled in their mothers’ arms and begged for candy, Coca-Colas, a movie, breast milk, anything to relieve the pre-cognate sensation that they were about to be sealed in their own tomb.

  Mercifully for the other passengers, Air France had shoehorned the freshman mixer into the final quarter of the plane, where I was headed. Towering backpacks loomed out of the overhead carriers, slammed half into place. Their owners draped themselves over their seats, gabbling on in a language tantalizingly similar to English (a phrase I stole, incidentally, from I don’t know where). Twenty rows ahead of me, the rat-faced Hofstra kid cut left across the center block of seats, faded right down the far aisle, and hauled in a perfectly spiraled Nerf football. His all-Slim-Jim diet seemed to be just the thing for an Airbus wide receiver.

  It took me ten minutes to push my way through to row 37. All the while, I was steeling myself to spend the night with feet propped on the duffel bag, trying to ignore some pill-popping young shit with his headset blasting Trans Am from Newark to Charles de Gaulle. I’d have no space to think, and I needed to do plenty of that now, starting with John Millis.

  Instead, 37G was occupied by a tiny woman with a big battleship-gray coif. I guessed she was in her mid-sixties. She had a fat hardback spread on her lap and a pair of horn-rimmed reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. I found the plane uneasily warm, but my new seatmate looked the picture of comfort in her tastefully tailored two-piece suit. A Louis Vuitton carry-on took up half the rack above us. The other half was filled with a black overcoat folded so the lining was on the outside. The label stared out at me in gold letters: YSL. I figured she’d drift off right after takeoff. The perfect seatmate.

  “Just be careful putting it back, dear,” she said to me with a smile. “I’m sure there’s room.”

  In fact, there was—just enough. The coat had a sable collar. I refolded it as if I were handling the Shroud of Turin. She smiled appreciatively at my ministrations and shifted her legs just enough for me to slip in beside her.

  “Patricia Hoag-Carrington,” she said briskly, offering me her hand.

  I left it at Max and edged back her book just far enough to have a look at the title: The Histories, Herodotus. Harvard University Press. Greek and English on facing pages. “That’ll keep you busy,” I said, hoping she would go back to reading.

  “Work,” she said with a small sigh. “I teach at NYU. Ancient Greek.”

  “Of course.”

  My rule is to never get chatty with the person sitting next to me on an airplane. You let some small piece of information slip, no matter how seemingly innocuous, and your seatmate is one step closer to unraveling larger truths. I’ve learned to spike any budding conversation by confiding that I compile actuarial tables on cancer victims for Munich Re, the mega–insurance broker. No one yet has encouraged me to go on.

  “Did you know,” she said, “that Helen never made it to Troy? Hermes spirited her off to Egypt, while Paris showed up at the gates with a body double. Imagine, the most famous war in history, and it was fought under false pretenses.”

  Aren’t they all? I thought. The First Crusade, Urban’s famous exhortation at Clermont to rescue the Greeks being slaughtered in Jerusalem by the Muslim hordes. Except they weren’t. Our own Civil War: free the slaves or steal a cheap labor pool. The Gulf of Tonkin and the Vietnam War. I kept my mouth shut, afraid I’d open the floodgates.

  I don’t know why, but I had a sense Patricia’s amiability was brittle. I wasn’t wrong. We had just leveled out at thirty-seven thousand feet when the dude with blond highlights in 38G kneed her seatback for the third time.

  “Swine,” she hissed as she eased her seat forward, then slammed it back again with surprising force. The “Fuck!” behind us suggested she had found her target. Satisfied, she turned her attention back my way. Fortunately, the stewardess saved me, looming over us.

  “Coffee? An aperitif?”

  The stewardess had a thousand-watt smile, but there was something cheerless about her all the same, one of those weird disconnects that always send me rummaging through my own memories of a disconnected childhood.


  Patricia and I both ordered wine.

  “Salut,” I said, intentionally butchering the French.

  “Santé,” she corrected, and with that, Patricia Hoag-Carrington buried herself in her book and fell silent.

  I picked up the novel I’d grabbed as I ran out the door of my apartment. A blurb promised “a riveting read with Tolstoyan sweep and Dickensian vitality.” It could have delivered instant nirvana, and it still couldn’t take my mind off what O’Neill said about Millis being murdered. Or that Millis had the Peshawar photo with him in the motel room. I stowed the riveting read and opened up the small napkin that came with my wine. With a pen fished from my jeans pocket, I drew a small, neat M right in the middle of the paper and began trying to piece together everything I knew.

  First, the facts, or what I had assumed them to be until a few hours earlier:

  John Millis was found shot to death on June 4, 2000, a Sunday, two days after I let him walk away from the Tune Inn with the photo. To be specific, Millis locked himself in a room at the Breezeway Motel in Fairfax, Virginia, leaned the side of his head into the muzzle of a twelve-gauge shotgun he’d bought only that afternoon at a nearby Wal-Mart, and pulled the trigger. There were powder burns on his hands, all the proof needed that the fatal wound had been self-inflicted, until (if O’Neill wasn’t wrong or fucking with my head) someone noticed that Millis’s brain had ended up where by the law of physics it shouldn’t have.

  As for motive, two hours before his death, Millis had walked out of a meeting with Rep. Porter Goss, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. The story had it that Goss had convened the small gathering to fire his staff director after George Tenet had showed him incontrovertible evidence that Millis was singing like a canary to the press; but neither Goss nor his chief counsel, who was also present, were talking, at least to anyone who talked to me.

  The motive part of the story had never made complete sense to me. In Washington, leaking is a rite of passage—proof that you’re in the know and too important to be held accountable for it. Besides, Millis had put his name on plenty of controversial assertions in the months before his death, like the time he told a Smithsonian audience that John Deutsch took first, second, and third prizes when it came to being the worst CIA director in history and that Bill Clinton was the worst president ever in terms of supporting the intelligence services. Still, in the absence of any other reason, I was willing to accept this one. Disgrace, if that’s what it was, hits us all from different angles.

  As for the photo that seemed to tie me to this sad event, or murder, or whatever Millis’s death was, it had been part of what’s officially known as a “201” file—a Directorate of Operations informant’s file. That’s what I had been looking for when I took the time off to go through Archives.

  The place reminded me of the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where they’re storing the ark in a dark, cavernous warehouse. Just to prove to me that she hadn’t been lying, the archivist who declared the file missing dropped the cardboard container on the counter between us from high enough up to launch a dust cloud and with enough whoof to let me know it was completely empty. One thing I’d learned in a quarter-century in the Agency is that you never take no for an answer, so I trotted out the lost-little-boy look that my ex-wife used to claim was my only honest expression and asked as meekly as I could muster:

  “Would it be possible to see the boxes stored on either side of this one?”

  And so we went for hours and hours—the boxes next to the boxes next to the boxes—until finally the archivist wrote me out a pass so I could rummage through the shelves myself, and that’s when, twenty-four hours later, I came upon the photo in an eight-by-eleven manila envelope marked Peshawar 387490, with the lost “201” file number on it but not with the file itself.

  Triumphant, I signed a form temporarily transferring the photo to my office. As promised, a courier delivered the Peshawar photo along with a dupe I’d requested (the one I now had in my pocket) to me a week later.

  “Salmon?”

  I looked up and saw my seatmate almost imperceptibly shake her head: No. “Too dry,” she mouthed. Beyond her, our cheerful-cheerless stewardess was holding two disposable plates.

  “The other,” I answered, which is how I happened to come into possession of a coq au vin, served on a bed of noodles, with a sidecar of carrots and green beans and a prosciutto-and-melon salad. It looked tasty enough, but the first bite told me Air France was outsourcing its meals, maybe to someplace like Guinea Bissau. I just hoped they weren’t doing the same with maintenance.

  Patricia and I were sipping our wine when 38G wriggled his stockinged foot into the space between our two chairs. We could almost see the odor coming off the threads.

  “Should I break his toes?” I asked, hoping to stay on her good side.

  “Heavens no,” she answered as she eased her seat forward once more and slammed it back again, with even more force than she had before, if that were possible. The sound behind us this time was so pitiable that I suspect she must have driven something—the other foot; a Walkman; perish the thought, even a book spine—straight into 38G’s manhood. I turned to steal a peek through the crack between our seats and saw him gobbling pills wholesale out of a makeshift vial and washing them down with some kind of soda pop. Uppers, downers, simple Ibuprofin—who knew. When I turned back, our dinner plates were gone. Patricia had a cup of steaming tea by her hand, thankfully her nose back in Herodotus.

  I retrieved the napkin I’d been writing on from my shirt pocket, flipped it over, wrote a “?” this time dead center in the paper square, and started over again. Why was the photo important enough for Millis to have it with him in the motel room? Other than bin Laden, he’d said he recognized only a Palestinian and a Gulf prince. Neither had any contact with the Agency, Millis was sure. I traced Nabil Shahadah after our lunch, and indeed there was nothing in the records indicating we’d ever met him. Millis had no idea about the headless guy in the salwar chemise. And whose name from the photo was he going to give me, anyway?

  A lot of other questions nagged at me, too, like the disappeared 201 file. I’d seen Archives lose a lot of documents, but this time I didn’t want to let it go as a coincidence. Every time I seemed to be closing in on identifying Colonel Mousavi—whether it was via our own archives or the UCLA registrar’s office—the paperwork had gone missing in front of me. What I kept coming back to, and this had been bothering me ever since the Tune Inn, was why Millis had been so damn eager to leave when I asked him who the headless horseman was? And what did all this have to do with Bill Buckley?

  I waited until my seatmate had gone off to the restroom, then stuffed my doodle-napkin into my unread novel, re-stowed that in the pouch on the back of the seat in front of me, opened the overhead rack, and slipped my laptop out of the carry-on.

  I started typing a chronology of events, from the first embassy bombing to Buckley’s kidnapping, events and the details surrounding them I had long ago memorized from my spiral notebooks. I was skimming them for answers when Patricia returned, wiggled once to settle herself comfortably, and went back to her book without so much as a glance my way. Just to be on the safe side, I skewed the screen slightly to the right, but not so much that I couldn’t read it or that its reflection could be seen clearly from the window beside me.

  I couldn’t find a single connection between Buckley’s kidnapping, bin Laden, and Peshawar. There wasn’t a shred of evidence anywhere in the files that Colonel Mousavi had been in Pakistan in the late 1980s or that he’d met bin Laden. Millis had said he couldn’t remember any Iranian close to bin Laden. But maybe he didn’t know. Or maybe he didn’t want me to know. That left me with the mystery of a twelve-year-old photo. Did Millis know what the connection was? Or was he just carrying the photo with him that last day of his life because he couldn’t think of any place to stow it? And how much sense did that make?

  Then there was the ransacking of my office by security.
Someone clearly had wanted my spiral notebooks. Or were they looking for the duplicate of the same photo, aware that Archives had signed over two copies to me?

  In espionage, the hard part isn’t connecting the dots; it’s figuring out what is a dot and what isn’t.

  CHAPTER 14

  PATRICIA HOAG-CARRINGTON had given up on Herodotus by the time I came back to earth again. Watching me tap on my keyboard was apparently far more interesting even though she couldn’t see the screen.

  “Doesn’t a bottle of ice-cold water sound delicious?” she asked when I looked up at her.

  I didn’t know what was the matter with pushing the little button overhead that summoned a stewardess, but I was thirsty myself, for something slightly stronger. I closed my laptop down, put it back in its carrying case, and waited for Patricia to slip her legs to the side before turning toward the galley to see what I could rustle up.

  At the far end of row 37, the Hofstra rat had a mini DVD camera out. Why couldn’t he just snore and drool like everyone else on the plane, I wondered, or watch Erin Brockovich for the fiftieth time? As I headed up the aisle, I caught Hofstra doing a quick pan around him. What ever happened to keeping a travel journal?

  I’ve always felt safe in airplanes. Thieves, touts, garden-variety scum—airplanes were the one place where they left you alone. Even domestic crises could disappear when you’re encapsulated in a plane. When Marissa and I were fracturing, I actually looked forward to shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic. Thirty-seven thousand feet up was the one place she couldn’t call me. But I’d learned another lesson in my twenty-five years in the business, and that was: Trust No One. Even inside the sanctity of headquarters, surrounded only by people who have the highest clearances possible, when you have to take a piss, you carry with you every classified piece of paper you arrived with. That’s what hit me now. The Hofstra kid’s camera pan meant nothing, but it made me nervous enough to turn back, reach across my seatmate for my laptop, and stow it in my carry-on in the overhead rack.