Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  The stewardesses were half asleep at the back of the plane. I roused one of them to find some of those miniature bottles of Scotch and an Evian for Patricia. She wandered into the rear galley and seemed to open twenty drawers. In the middle of it Muhlenberg popped in and asked for a Coke. I shrugged my shoulders to let the stewardess know I didn’t mind waiting. Next, Muhlenberg asked for some peanuts, then a napkin; then she tried to strike up a conversation with the woman. I was beginning to think I might grow old and die exactly where I stood when she finally waddled back down the aisle. The stewardess looked as relieved as I did as she fitted me out with four drink-size hits of Dewar’s, a plastic glass, and a bottle for my seatmate. The water was warm, but I wheedled a second glass out of her, filled with ice.

  Back at row 37, Patricia was snoring daintily, glasses still perched magically on the tip of her nose, hands folded on the open pages of her book. My novel was lying on the seat, not in the pouch where I had left it. I reached over Patricia, gave the pages a shake, and when nothing came out, I knew my notes were gone.

  My carry-on had been rifled, too. It almost fell on Patricia’s head when I flipped open the overhead bin. I could tell by its shape that the laptop was gone, but I stuck my hand in anyway, just to make sure. I must have stared at my carry-on for a full minute, wondering if I’d finally lost my mind, before I broadened the search. The inside pocket where I’d stowed my passport was empty. Who would steal a passport on a plane? Didn’t everyone already have one when they boarded? Get robbed on an airplane, and any residual illusions about sanctity vanish completely.

  I was returning my carry-on to the overhead compartment when I saw Patricia’s Louis Vuitton staring me in the face. It, too, had been shifted slightly. Her black overcoat was skewed to the side. Patricia had been the one, after all, who sent me for water. Even if someone had been looking at her do it, they would have assumed she was searching through her own bag. It was insane, probably, but I eased back the zipper on her carry-on, stuck my hand inside, and began to feel around.

  “For great wrongdoing, there are great punishments from the gods.” The voice came from below me.

  “Herodotus?”

  She nodded her head yes.

  “I don’t suppose it would do any good if I—”

  She simply shook her head in the opposite direction as I zipped her bag closed and quietly snapped in place the lid of the overhead bin. Patricia didn’t bother to move her legs to let me in. By the time I had climbed over her, reshut my book and stowed it, and let down the table tray, her eyes were closed again, her breathing soft and steady.

  I put Patricia’s water bottle in the net pouch on the back of the seat in front of her, gave myself a reassuring hug, and was reassured in turn by the slim contours of my two stolen passports, my address book, and the tiny fortune safely tucked in the inside lining of my jacket. And a good thing it was because at that moment the last thing I looked forward to was presenting myself to the French airport police without a passport. They would have sent me on to the vice-consul at the American embassy, who would have forwarded my name to Foggy Bottom, where enough bells and whistles would have gone off that the Mothership would be alerted immediately and Webber could have treated himself to another diamond ring.

  Of course, there was still a chance the French would figure out I was trying to enter the country on a stolen passport, in which event I’d be spending the day and night in La Santé, the notorious Paris prison where etiquette calls for welcoming each new invitee with a full cavity search. But that was a chance I was willing to take. I unscrewed the tops from my four bottles, poured them all into the glass, and reached up to flick off my own light. Time to self-medicate.

  CHAPTER 15

  A SHELL-POCKED ROAD. Rock-strewn fields stretched out in every direction as far as the eye could see. I was standing in the middle of it, wearing a fluorescent orange shirt bright as any school crossing guard, but the strange thing was that I seemed to be invisible. A pair of Russian Mig-27’s came toward me full blowers, maybe twenty yards off the ground. As they got closer, I saw I was wrong. They were F-15’s, ours. The roar was deafening; their exhaust, like showering in a hot mist of gasoline. They were looking for me. What else would they be doing out there? But even though I couldn’t be missed—I stood out like a nun in a slaughterhouse—they hadn’t seen me.

  A dust storm started up on the horizon straight in front of me, grew larger, came closer until I realized it was a column of Bradleys—fifty of them, a hundred, two hundred, I had no perspective, no angle, no way to judge where the end of the line might be. Even if I couldn’t be seen, I needed to move, had to get out of their path, realized now they were bearing down on me at Grand Prix speed. But my feet wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t tell what it was: My shoes were somehow magnetized to the roadbed. The lead Bradley was a football field from me, then twenty yards. Then someone grabbed me by the arm. I looked over at him. He had flaming red hair. Sapphire blue eyes. He was pulling me, yelling at me in French-accented American English to run, save myself.

  “Welcome to Charles de Gaulle Airport,” someone squawked from an overhead speaker in three languages, none of them clear. Outside the window, Paris looked to be underwater, but maybe that was just me.

  Patricia Hoag-Carrington’s temperament remained sour. She rose while the plane was still taxiing, stared hard at me, then snapped open the overhead bin, carefully shook her coat out, took down her Louis Vuitton carry-on, and without ever looking at me again started up the aisle.

  “Madame!” the stewardess called out. “Madame! Non!” But to no avail.

  Relieved to be free of her scorn, I waited my turn. Herodotus’s injunction about great misfortune still sat heavily on me.

  The immigration line was moving at a snail’s pace. I pulled out the Irish passport, boned up on who I was and where and when I’d been born. Thanks to the miracle of modern document doctoring, Eamon Mooney and I couldn’t have looked more alike if we had been hatched from the same sperm cell and ovum. Sleep deprivation must have taken its toll because I remembered my yellow entry form just in time to scribble in the blanks and hand it to the blue-shirted cop along with my passport.

  “Ah,” he said after a quick glance. “Ireland. Land of Joyce.” And waved me through.

  After I grabbed my garment bag from the baggage carousel and cleared customs, I took an elevator down to a sub-basement where I’d once met an Algerian baggage handler who claimed to have proof that a Saudi prince was a transvestite turning tricks in that famous Parisian open-air whorehouse, the Bois de Bologne. He wasn’t, but I remembered the out-of-the-way café for airport employees where I’d met him. I needed a caffeine fix.

  I was sitting by myself, nursing an espresso and reading Le Figaro,when I heard the whir of an electric baggage cart coming down the hall in the direction of the café. An African in a blue jumpsuit, airport badges dangling from his pocket, sat behind the wheel. The cart itself was stacked high with magazines, newspapers, and paperbacks all bound up with plastic straps. I was turning back to my own reading when I saw a man lunge at the baggage cart and grab the steering wheel. Drunk, I said to myself, just as the cart swerved and came barreling toward the café, and that’s when I knew that what I was seeing wasn’t what was happening at all.

  Early on in my career with the CIA, I’d taken a monthlong course in a “shoot house.” The first day we learned to kick down a door, roll into a room with a mixture of dummy hostages and their captors, and take out the bad guys with a Heckler & Koch MP5 on single shot. It was a walk in the park. I double-tapped all three terrorists, point blank in the forehead, and with the suppressor there was barely a pop. The next day, they turned out the lights and gave me a pair of night-vision goggles. My pickups weren’t as fast, but still I didn’t hit a hostage. A week later, after they’d ratcheted up the pace, they took my silencer away. Next they set off deafening flash-bang grenades. After that, they made us exercise until our heartbeat hit 145. Each day the pressure went
up. The last day, I kicked open the door and was met by a wall of deafening and blinding flash-bang grenades, thundering music, targets moving all over the place. I was dead before I got off a single round.

  In shoot-house speak, what they were trying to teach us was “target discrimination.” When things go to shit, you have to decide in a split second what the immediate danger is. Then the next. What do the bad guys want you to do. And what’s going to save the hostages’ lives, and yours. All this raced through my mind in an instant, the way great training always does, as the cart driver bore down on me. I waited until the last second, until there was no space left to correct course, before I rolled to the side and watched him careen into the wall behind me and go flying face first into its mirror panels.

  Blood, shouting—I feigned interest until the drunk, suddenly sober, grabbed my carry-on and garment bag, and took off at a half-trot that all but begged me to race after him. Ahab could have run faster, peg leg and all, but that in fact was the point. As he was taking off, I did a lightning inventory of the two bags’ contents. My clothes. Toiletries. All replaceable. If I followed, a scene would ensue, one of the parties to which—me—had entered France on a stolen passport. The next thing I knew, the police would be calling the Irish embassy.

  I still had what mattered—the photo, two passports, and my money. I’d stick with the plan: Go into Paris, see if I dragged anything with me, catch my breath, and take an afternoon train to Zurich.

  I went out the arrivals door and stood in the taxi queue. Two dozen people in front of me, Patricia Hoag-Carrington was just getting into a cab. I half expected something dramatic—a last-minute wave, a flip of that improbable sable collar against what was already a warm Parisian sun—but there was nothing of the sort. Instead, I got to wonder what she had possibly been doing in the airport all that time, especially since she had raced off the plane like a woman on a mission.

  Maybe twenty-five yards in front of Patricia, a minibus sat parked at the curb with a sign in the back window: FIRST HERSHEY BIBLE CLUB. I couldn’t be certain from my distance—and my track record of late was no comfort—but I thought I recognized a pair of porcine hips and a feral profile clambering onto the minibus. I was about to write if off when Muhlenberg popped up at the back window next to the sign, waved frantically to catch my attention, and blew me a kiss while Hofstra shot me the bird.

  Knowing they were together changed everything.

  CHAPTER 16

  NOT ONLY HAD I HAD BLANKET COVERAGE all the way from Newark, and from New York a few days earlier; they also wanted me to know they were on me. That’s what that little pop-up screen featuring Muhlenberg and Hofstra had been all about—a message: We’ve got you in our sights, we’ll always have you in our sights, so give it up or else. The wrecked Norton and the guy in the poncho in front of my Adams Morgan apartment calling me paranoid were part of the same campaign. But give what up? My spiral notebooks, my laptop, my luggage were gone. Since the only thing I had left was the photo, that had to be the prize. Whoever was after me knew there were two copies from the missing 201 file. One was accounted for, with John Millis’s blood splattered all over it. That left one at large, and that meant me. Time to tie up loose ends, then change course.

  I went back in the airport, bought a telephone card from the news kiosk, placed a call to New York University, and got the all-night operator.

  “Normal business hours—”

  There’s been an accident, I explained in my best broken English. A traffic fatality on the road to Lyon. All we’ve been able to recover was a plastic faculty ID card.

  The operator transferred me to the campus security office, which assured me that no one by the name Patricia Hoag-Carrington taught at NYU, adjunct or on staff, classics department or anywhere else.

  “But—”

  “No one.”

  My second call was to Chris Corsini, the one person in America who should have gotten used to my calling in the middle of the night.

  “Corsini, it’s Max.”

  “Great. It’s—what—two-oh-three in the morning.” I could practically hear him checking his Breitling.

  “Sorry.”

  “Why do I have the feeling I’m about to board the lunatic express?” In the background, I could hear his wife telling me, him, someone to die.

  “I need a real big favor. A name.”

  “It can’t wait, I’ll bet.”

  “I wouldn’t be calling…I need it in the next twenty-four hours.”

  “Jesus. Okay. Whose?”

  “Wait. Is there a pay phone near you?”

  “How would I know? I own my—”

  “A 7-Eleven? An all-night pharmacy? Something like that.”

  “I guess so. Why?”

  “Here. Take this down.” I read off the number in front of me on my own pay phone. “Find one and call me from it. Five minutes.”

  “You’re sloshed, Max. Fucked up in the head. Or both.”

  He hung up. I called him back.

  “Chris, this is life or death. I’m not fucking with you. I can’t take the chance your phone is tapped.”

  “All right, all right. My God, I’ve lost my mind, too. Not five minutes, though. Ten. Maybe fifteen.”

  He called me back in ten. I could hear trucks grinding by on a highway not far away.

  “I need to know who was sitting in seat 37G, AF 19 last night.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll explain later. A woman.”

  “Shit almighty. You barely get away from one and now you meet some bimbo on an airplane who refused to give you her name. Maybe not such a bimbo after all.”

  “First thing Monday, call your compliance officer and give him the flight number, the seat number. He can get his private investigator to check airline reservations. Air France is either on Apollo or Saber airline databases. He’ll figure it out.”

  “They’ll take me out in a straitjacket.”

  “Match the seat number to a credit card, and you get a name.”

  “Why don’t you get one of your shady friends to do it?”

  Shady friends? Maybe Chris knew me better than I ever realized. But the private security business is a tiny, tight world, and everyone in it is tied to some intel service one way or another. Chances were very good that this little trace request would end up in Langley no matter how carefully I couched it. Outsourcing through Chris was just about my only chance to hide my hand.

  “Chris, I really, really need this.”

  “If I promise to do it, you’ll let me go home and back to sleep?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Shit.”

  “Another number. Take it down.” I read off Webber’s cell phone, the one I’d cajoled out of him at headquarters. “I need to know every call he made Friday after five.”

  “Is this legal?”

  “Your compliance guy will know the way it works. They get it from the international registry.”

  “Okay.” That’s what he said. What he meant was, he’d do it, and I’d pay him back for the rest of my life.

  Next I called Yuri Duplenski in Damascus. The phone sputtered as if it might catch fire any moment. I kept yelling Yuri’s name into the static, until finally a voice boomed back at me.

  “Who?”

  “Max. Max Waller.”

  “Who?”

  I was shouting into the phone so loud, people stopped to stare at me.

  “Max?” Yuri finally said. “Max!”

  Yuri and I hadn’t seen each other since 1984 when he was working for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, in Beirut. Our last get-together had been a memorable one, though: a vodka binge that ended as so many of them seemed to do when one of us got the brilliant idea of driving up to the Biqa’ and firing off a rocket-propelled grenade at Israeli lines. Fortunately, I ran my car into a ditch before we ever got out of Beirut.

  At one point I’d considered recruiting Yuri as an informant. I even loaned him two thousand dollars after Moscow star
ted asking about some money that seemed to have gone missing from his till. My loan saved Yuri from a recall to Moscow, maybe worse, and in the normal course of events, I could have used it to reel Yuri in to our side. But I eventually decided he wasn’t recruitable. Yuri had big dreams. There was no way the CIA could ever pay out the kind of money he was after. I never got around to asking him for the money back, just swallowed it. I wasn’t going to mention it to him now on the telephone. But he and I understood our bonds were deeper than friendship.

  “You know how to drink yet, Max?” Yuri had no intention of letting me forget our last ride.

  “Yes. No. Anyhow, I need a ride out of Europe.”

  I’d read in an intelligence report that after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yuri had left the GRU for the black-arms market and was now operating a fleet of ships and planes around the Med, Africa, and the Middle East. Or maybe he was still in the GRU, selling arms. It didn’t matter. In Russia, lines separating state business and criminal business have never been very well defined.

  “I got it,” Yuri said. “There’s a woman after you.”

  “Actually it’s something else.”

  “Italy. La Spezia,” he said. “First stop is Benghazi. Then—”

  “I’ll take it.” I’d figure out later where to get off.

  I could hear him leafing through some kind of book, running his finger down a list, cursing the tiny print and his failing eyesight.