Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  But I was lucky, and I finally did make it to the tiny Italian outpost of Chiapili, a little after dawn. Thirty minutes later, I hitched a ride with a milk truck down to Ceresole Reale, at the bottom of the lake by the same name. From there, two hundred American dollars found me a ride to Turin and another two hundred—same driver, different car—to Genoa. In the Piazza Principe, I caught the last bus of the day to La Spezia, and by one-thirty that morning, I was doling out twenty American dollars to a half-drunk cabbie, who got lost four times before he found the port. At one point we ran out of gas and I had to give him money to put twenty liters in the tank.

  Even then, I must have wandered around the docks for half an hour or more before I found a lineup of a couple dozen virtually brand-new Mercedes, Porsches, and Audis, and followed them right on board. An auto transport, Yuri had told me. Maybe he’d gone legit.

  CHAPTER 20

  I’D SPENT MY LIFE in shitholes where the water is undrinkable, where the rats carry bubonic plague, where you’re lucky if you just catch malaria, and I’d never been sick a day. Two hours after we left port on Yuri’s rust bucket, I was hit with a fever that I was sure was pneumonia. I slept for forty-eight hours, shivering and sweating. Probably longer. My cabin didn’t have a porthole. I couldn’t tell day from night. I slept right through Benghazi and a couple other ports.

  By day three, the fever felt like it was breaking, but I still couldn’t eat or even leave my bunk except when I had to. On the fourth day, I stepped unsteadily out on deck, took a brief stroll around, and did a double take. We’d left La Spezia sailing under the Xerxes II. Now we were the Demopolis. I had this suspicion we were carrying more than just cars.

  I was an albatross, bad luck. The crew ignored me. It was fine with me. I had time to try to sort out the story to date. Here’s what bothered me: I’d had blanket coverage all the way from Newark, and at least a day in New York a week earlier. Both times it was Applied Science Research, a company I now knew (thanks to O’Neill) Webber had on contract to do his dirty work. I then get to Paris, and someone calls in the French. It couldn’t have been Applied Science Research on its own. The French still have too much common sense to outsource espionage. There had to have been some kind of nod from the CIA. Webber again? He had been assigned to Paris and would have known who to call. I didn’t have a shred of evidence it was him, but it was the only thing I could think of. Who else would mobilize a resource like that? Still, it didn’t add up. Webber wanted me out of the Agency, sure, but now that I was gone, why keep up the chase?

  Then there was the mystery of robbing me. The first time, on the plane, they got my laptop. The second time, in the café, my clothes. The only thing of value I had left was the photo. I’d already established that. The only reason for calling in the French that I could think of was to set up another chance at grabbing it. But who other than me cared about a twelve-year-old snapshot? Webber? Not likely. O’Neill was right: No one in the government, CIA or otherwise, gave a damn about Bill Buckley.

  Still, it had to be the photo. And if the interest in it had nothing to do with Buckley, then it was someone else. Or something else. I was sweating in a dark cabin, churning through all the possibilities I could come up with, when the blindingly obvious occurred to me: Ask someone in the photo. I could immediately cross off bin Laden. The Taliban would cut my head off as soon as I tried to cross the border into Afghanistan. That left me with Nabil Shahadah, the only other person in the photo I knew by name.

  Shahadah wasn’t going to be easy to find. At least three Israeli commando teams had been shot up trying to get to him before me. Now drones armed with Hellfire missiles flew over Gaza 24/7 ready to incinerate Nabil the first lock they got. Still, I couldn’t see another choice. If I didn’t get an answer to the picture, I’d live the rest of my life as the Flying Dutchman of ex-spooks, pursued for a reason I couldn’t begin to understand. First, though, I needed to put down a red herring.

  CHAPTER 21

  ASK THE AVERAGE PERSON what he thinks “going off the grid” means, and he’ll tell you something about catching a Greyhound bus in Wilmington, Delaware, getting off in Bozeman, Montana, hiking up into the mountains, building a shack out of bark, and going without electricity, a phone, or anything else that links you to the digital cosmos. He has it only half right.

  Going off the grid in my world means two things. Step one: Systematically erase all “stable indices” in your life. No credit cards, no checks, no cell phones, no calls to family or anyone else who could be tied to you in any database. I’d already executed most of step one, or more accurately, the thief on the plane had: getting rid of my true-name passport. The cash had freed me of credit cards. Carthage Voyages and Yuri was another step in the right direction. There was no database in the world that could connect me to them. (I’d never reported either to headquarters, although I have to admit I couldn’t eliminate the possibility that Yuri had reported his contact with me to Moscow.) Skiing into Italy meant I left no border prints, either.

  Step two is just as important: Create a virtual identity in another place, preferably another country. You need to give your pursuers something to do, waste their time and money, and irritate the hell out of local authorities with leads that don’t go anywhere.

  I dozed off for yet another long sleep and woke to find the boat stopped dead in the water, engines idling. It was dark, eleven at night by my watch. I was half amazed in my stupor at the humanlike cries of the seabirds, and then I realized they weren’t birds at all. We were docked. Larnaca. Cyprus. I grabbed my jacket—everything I now owned—and went up on deck. The Demopolis or whatever we were now called was deserted. A parade of roaches the size of field mice led the way down the gangplank.

  I’d spent enough time in and out of the harbor to know that this close to midnight, immigrations and customs would be closed, or at least dozing. I could have walked out of the port unchallenged, but I needed to start establishing a virtual persona here. I pounded on the door of immigrations for at least ten minutes until some bleary-eyed guy with his shirttail out sleepily recorded the arrival of Eamon Mooney, stamped the Irish passport, and let me through without a word.

  From there, I checked into a suite at the Flamingo Beach Hotel, then went back out to cruise Larnaca’s run-down waterfront until I came to Scottie’s, a scabby imitation-pub watering hole for sunburnt and homesick Brits. At the end of the bar were three twenty-something girls partying, one brunette and two blondes. I sat next to the bemused blonde in a pink spaghetti-strap tank top.

  “Eamon,” I said, sticking out my hand, nodding to her two friends.

  “What kind of Yank has a name like Eamon?” she asked. Australian to the bone.

  I pulled out a wad of bills, bought a round of drinks for the four of us. The brunette and the other blonde took their drinks and wandered off, leaving Alice to me.

  Alice was from Alice Springs, although maybe that was just to help her remember both sides of her story. She’d just quit her waitressing job and was blowing her savings on a one-way trip to London—via Cyprus—where she hoped to figure out life.

  By the time the bartender started to pull down the metal shutters an hour or so later, Alice was too sloshed to walk on her own. I helped her out the door, and by the time we got to my hotel, I was practically carrying her. The desk clerk at the Flamingo didn’t give Alice a second look.

  Up in my room, I tucked Alice in and sat down on the corner of my bed. She was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

  I called my old office near Tysons Corner, hoping someone would be working at least to closing time. Jake was—just the guy I’d hoped to talk with.

  “Max, what happened to you?” He pretended to be pleased to hear from me.

  “I’m in Larnaca. On my way to Jeddah. I need a favor.”

  Silence.

  “I need to see Rafik Hariri. Know anyone who knows how to get in touch with him in Jeddah?”

  Hariri was Lebanon’s prime minister, although he�
��d made his fortune in Saudi Arabia. Even after he became prime minister, Hariri spent a good part of his life in Saudi Arabia. A lot of Lebanese considered him a paid agent of the Saudi royal family.

  “I wouldn’t go near him, especially you, especially now.”

  “I’m on to something. Something I’ve been after for years. Hariri holds the keys. Isn’t there some ex–case officer who works in Hariri’s Jeddah office?”

  In fact, I knew exactly who I was talking about: Bill McGuiness. I could see him clear as day charging down the halls, always looking straight ahead, never acknowledging anyone. Ex-Marine. Silver-blond hair. Every other word was fuck.

  “You mean that crazy bastard who snarled like a mad dog?” Jake said. “Bill something.”

  “That’s it. Bill McGuiness. Got a telephone number for him?”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll find him. But if you can think of anything, I’m at the Flamingo in Larnaca.”

  What was going to happen within the next five minutes was that Jake would walk into his new boss’s office and relay my conversation word for word. The new boss would then call the Counter-Espionage Center, setting off a blizzard of one-page memos about Max Waller’s going off the reservation. The seventh floor would go on full alert, especially after Counter-Espionage produced my spiral notebook and the Peshawar photo as Exhibit A. What better evidence that I was still after the Buckley grail.

  Headquarters would easily buy off on the story line that I was on my way to Saudi Arabia to see Hariri. Hariri ran his own private intelligence service. As prime minister of Lebanon he could tap into all sorts of official Lebanese intelligence bases. He was in a position to dig up something on Buckley. But just as useful for my misdirection, as far as the seventh floor was concerned, I couldn’t be in worse company.

  After Bill McGuiness was fired for gross incompetence, he spilled every secret he knew to Hariri. He came close to being indicted. On top of it, Hariri was despised on the seventh floor. In Jeddah in the early seventies—back when he was a procurer of girls and liquor for the Saudi royal family—he’d openly cultivated connections to the CIA, using them as a platform to claim to the royals that he was a conduit to Washington. (Hookers aside, Hariri’s reporting turned out to be all lies, and headquarters eventually dumped him.) Now that he was a prime minister and a triple A-list player in Washington, pouring millions into K Street lobbying firms, Hariri had set himself up as the avowed enemy of the CIA, dumping on it at every party he attended. The way headquarters would look at it, having Bill McGuiness, Hariri, and me together in Saudi Arabia was the perfect storm.

  There’d be meetings all day tomorrow at Langley, followed by calls to the Cypriots and the Saudis. My bet was Alice’s wake-up would be a cop pounding on the door. They wouldn’t find me, but I wanted them to think they knew where I was going and why. It would take them a month to figure out I wasn’t on my way to the Kingdom.

  Just to make sure no one missed the lead, I wrote Alice a note and propped it on the dresser: “Had to pop over to Jeddah a couple days. Please stay. Restaurant etc. is at your disposal. Eamon.”

  Downstairs, I left a thousand-dollar deposit with the desk clerk and asked him to make me a reservation to Jeddah on the first flight. While I waited for a cab to the airport, I borrowed the desk clerk’s computer and logged into the e-fax site I’d left with Chris Corsini: one last unfinished piece of business before I disappeared.

  Chris had come through: an eighty-six-page list of all Webber’s cell calls for the previous three months. The evening Webber sacked me he’d called three numbers. One, in San Diego, he’d dialed six times. A quick reverse-directory check told me it was Applied Science. That’s exactly what I’d expected. The second number was one in Maine. The reverse directory listed a post office box as an address, but no name to go along with it.

  The third number Webber had called that evening I didn’t need to look up: It was Frank Beckman’s house.

  CHAPTER 22

  Tel Aviv, Israel

  AS THE YOUNG IMMIGRATIONS GIRL at Ben Gurion Airport read my German passport and tapped in the name and birthday, I kept my fingers crossed that, one, she didn’t speak German (mine was seriously flawed); two, she didn’t notice I didn’t look like a Horst Friedrich Arends; and, three, the Germans were as lazy as the Irish and hadn’t sent a notification around that the passport was stolen. In the middle of her tapping she made a call, turned away from me, and whispered into the telephone handset. I figured I’d been spotted and wondered how many years I would get for trying to enter Israel on phony paper. But the call apparently had nothing to do with me, and she waved me through without looking at me a second time.

  I didn’t tell the Palestinian taxi driver I wanted to go to the West Bank until we were out of the airport and it was too late for him to tell me to fuck off. June had been an especially bad month for taxis getting stoned and shot up in the West Bank, even ones with Palestinian plates. I didn’t mention the word Rafat, where Nabil was from and where I was going, until we were well past Jerusalem.

  The driver knew Rafat was a fire-breathing Hamas stronghold. Several commanders of Hamas’s military wing and a half dozen suicide bombers came from there. The Israeli army entered it only in force and backed up with heavy armor. The driver agreed to keep going only after I handed him $250 and promised to pay him another $250 when we got back to Tel Aviv.

  Two hours east of Tel Aviv, we cut off the main highway and bumped down a dirt road. A thirty-minute drive over barren, hardscrabble hills, and we came to Rafat, which sits on top of a windswept ridge. It looks pretty much like every other poor village in that part of the West Bank: unpaved, dusty streets, stone houses, groves of terraced olive trees in ground more rock than dirt.

  The driver had to ask three times before we found where Nabil Shahadah’s father lived, and then we found it only by spotting the heap of rubble and grove of ploughed-up olive trees in front of the house just below his. I didn’t need to be told the story. As soon as the Israelis found out Nabil was a new impresario of suicide bombings, army bulldozers showed up and flattened everything that belonged to him. The house, I’d read somewhere, had been built by Nabil’s father in the hope that Nabil would marry one day and come back to Rafat to live. I suppose Nabil’s father was lucky; if Nabil had been living at home, the father’s house would have been bulldozed, too.

  Razing houses, displacing families, and generally spreading misery among the brothers and sisters, the fathers and mothers of suicide bombers was Old Testament justice, the way the Israelis looked at it. An eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, a message to any would-be suicide bombers: You spend eternity in a celestial garden, but your family pays the price in the here and now. Long ago the Israelis had figured out that the Palestinians’ Achilles’ heel is the family. Palestinians—all Arabs, really—are bonded to their families in ways we can’t begin to understand in the West. Find some way to tap into those bonds, and you knock the wind out of the resistance. Or so the Israelis were counting on.

  Nabil’s father, Muhammad, was standing out in front of his house when we pulled up. With his sad eyes and in his dirty dishdash and frayed silk cap, he looked tired, defeated maybe, another victim of a war that seemed to have no winners.

  I told Nabil’s father I was a German journalist doing a profile on his son.

  The father shook my hand and motioned me to a cement bench running along the side of the house. He pulled up an old rickety table as his wife brought us two cups of tea that were more sugar than tea and a plate of cookies. She went back inside to leave us alone to talk.

  “Nabil was a good boy,” the father said. “A good student, a good son.”

  It sounded practiced and probably was. Nabil was a hero in the Arab world. Hundreds of journalists came to Rafat to interview his father.

  “A brilliant electrical engineer, I heard,” I said, encouraging him to talk.

  One of the first things they taught us about interrogation at the Farm
is to enter the logic of whoever you’re talking with. If you’re interrogating Icarus, don’t confront him on how smart it was to jump off a cliff with wings made of feathers, wax, and linen, and fly into the sun. Instead, ask him about the various qualities of wax, the best feathers, the weight of the linen. You always want to make someone feel you’re on his side.

  The father motioned me to get up and follow him inside. There was a small bookcase filled with college textbooks. I pulled one out. Neatly written on the flyleaf was Nabil Muhammad Shahadah and a year, 1994. I pulled out a loose piece of paper; it was a drawing for the firing mechanism of a rocket-propelled grenade.

  I looked around the room; there was no memento from Nabil’s time with bin Laden. I remembered that after Afghanistan—he’d been there less than six months—Nabil returned to Rafat, finished high school, and went to Birzeit University. Three years later, he had his degree in electrical engineering. He had joined Hamas at some point when he was at the university, but the Israelis first found out about him, or rather his handiwork, when they were hit by a series of roadside bombs set off by remote-control detonators—detonators designed and built by Nabil.

  “Nabil always held a suit so well,” the father said, pointing to a picture of his son hanging over the sofa. “He was a handsome boy. He has so many of them.” He motioned me to follow him again, this time upstairs.

  In a back bedroom the father opened a closet door to reveal a rack of suits. He shook the hangers gently, dusted the shoulders of the suits with a cloth from his pocket.

  Back outside, I told the father I intended to find Nabil and interview him.

  “I haven’t talked to him in two years,” he said.

  “But you know how to get in touch with him, don’t you?”

  “No.”