Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  Granted, Millis and Frank knew each other from Millis’s Peshawar days, when Frank was head of the Afghan Task Force. It wouldn’t be odd if they called each other from time to time. But what was the call on June 4 about? I would have thought Millis had other things on his mind.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE PRINCE’S RANGE ROVER and driver were waiting out front, engine running, when I walked out. I was just about ready to get into the passenger seat when I spotted what looked like the same three guys I’d seen the day before sitting in the BMW. One guy was wearing the same black vest. Only now they were standing by a late-model Mercedes in front of the Al Dente restaurant. All three were wearing sandals. Christians, and especially Christians living in Ashrafiyah, don’t wear sandals. Invading Muslim hordes wear sandals. The rest of their clothing was way too shabby for Ashrafiyah. None of them had beards, but that didn’t mean anything.

  I motioned for the driver to sit tight, then went back inside the Albergo and asked the receptionist if I could see the manager. I was told he was in the dining room on the eighth floor.

  The manager was French, maybe fifty, as slim and elegant as the rest of the place: Lanvin tie, the whole Gallic works, shining like a lighthouse all the way across the room. I asked him if I could have a word in private, and he led me out to the terrace, which overlooks Martyrs’ Square, the old city, and beyond that the Med. It crossed my mind that Buckley’s penultimate act of freedom was doing just this: taking a last look at the sea.

  “I need to use a private office.”

  “My office is completely at your disposal.” It’s hard to beat a deluxe hotel, as Mother used to lecture me.

  I followed the manager downstairs and waited while he unlocked his office. Then I surprised him by closing the door behind me, with him on the outside. First, I scanned all the documents the prince had given me in Shtawrah and downloaded them onto the manager’s computer. I logged onto the Internet and went to wwwcom, a site run by a CIA proprietary with software that allows you to hide scanned documents in images. Then I picked out three photos from the hotel’s website and distributed the documents between them. When I was through, I wrote an e-mail to John O’Neill:

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. O’Neill:

  We are pleased to confirm your reservations for 24 September.

  The Albergo.

  As soon as the e-mail was launched, I erased it along with the scanned documents, then used the hotel’s photocopier to make a copy of the documents for the manager to overnight to O’Neill. The originals I was going to walk out of the hotel with. If it wasn’t my paranoia running wild—if in fact those three guys outside were waiting for me—I wanted them to have something to grab. Never disappoint a mugger. The last thing I did was to make out an Aramex international air bill addressed to O’Neill at his office.

  The manager was waiting outside the door when I came out, seemingly unperturbed that I’d taken over his office for almost thirty minutes.

  “There is a possibility someone will come and ask for this package you’re about to send for me,” I said. “Don’t give it to them under any circumstances.”

  He nodded gravely as I handed it to him along with the air bill, like a partisan about to be sent over enemy lines.

  The Albergo ran like a Swiss clock. It was famous for it in small circles. As soon as I turned around to leave, the manager would give the packet to an incorruptible bellboy who would run off to the nearest Aramex office, which would dispatch the documents to either the London or Paris flight. Within hours, my packet would be in the air, out of reach of whoever was waiting outside to talk to me.

  As I headed for the door, I considered the possibility that the gang outside could simply push their way through the lobby when I was gone, image the Albergo’s computer, and come up with the e-mail and scanned papers, but I didn’t see it happening. The overnight package and the prince’s originals, I thought, should be all the misdirection I needed.

  As things turned out, I probably overreacted. The Mercedes was gone from in front of Al Dente. There wasn’t a person in sight in sandals or underdressed in any way for overdressed Ashrafiyah. The entire streetscape was the very picture of upscale, old, Christian Beirut. I took a deep breath of relief, crossed the street, and let myself into the back of the prince’s Range Rover.

  As I got in, I saw three photos on the seat, all facedown. Two were eight-by-ten black-and-white glossies. The first one was of an overturned car, the prince lying beside it, eyes closed almost in repose, some kind of mottled scarf around his neck. The photo looked as if it had been taken on the Shtawra-Balabakk road. The second photo showed the same car, same road, from the other side. A second man lay faceup. Half his head seemed to have been blown off or scraped away. The other half looked enough like the prince that I guessed it was his brother, the adviser to Kuwaiti intelligence.

  “Let’s go!” I yelled to the driver as I picked up the third photo: an old Polaroid, color, four-by-four. The man kneeling in the foreground was some emaciated version of Bill Buckley. Standing behind him was the Iranian from Peshawar. A little younger but definitely him. In the sunlight, his red hair seemed to be on fire. Then I looked closer. Someone had colored the hair red with a Magic Marker.

  “Go!” I screamed again at the driver.

  He turned around, but it wasn’t anyone I’d ever seen before. He was still staring at me as he slipped the key out of the ignition, opened the door, and began to walk away.

  I was lunging to do the same when a gray Internal Security Forces Toyota Land Cruiser screeched to within an inch of the Rover’s front fender and the two occupants jumped out. Neither was in uniform, but one carried an M-16.

  “Passport!” one of them yelled at me, sticking his head through the back window. He was clean shaven. He could have been a cop. How was I to know?

  I was pulling the German passport out of my back pocket when he jammed his pistol into my temple. “On the floor!” he yelled, this time in French.

  He opened the door, climbed in, dug his foot into the back of my head, and assured me that if I moved so much as a fingernail, I’d be pudding; then he threw a jacket over my head.

  I was trying to figure out what the immediate future might hold—arrest, interrogation, torture, more; I’d been trained for them, even had more than a taste of each—when the other door opened and someone slid calmly in.

  “Mr. Waller, you know what you are? The inoculation. The inoculation against the truth. You run around the world, wildly exposing some insane plot about bombing airplanes, a plot hatched by a redheaded Iranian. They write you off as mad. ‘Poor, poor soul,’ they say when another such story passes by them. ‘Some fool actually listened to Waller.’ If you didn’t exist, I would have had to invent you.”

  The accent was American, but with a peculiar rolling r. Terry Anderson had been right on the money: like someone who learns French before English.

  “So you see, Mr. Waller, the Bible is a liar. You have a small piece of the truth right now, but you don’t look very free to me.”

  He was sliding out the far door when someone reached in and swiped me across the side of the head with the butt of a rifle—a love tap, really, just enough to stun me and send blood streaming down my shirt collar and jacket while he rifled my pockets. By the time I realized I was alone and could finally get up, the ISF jeep was gone, as was anyone who had bothered to watch what was happening. A chic lady dressed to the nines walked by, looked at me in the backseat of the Range Rover, turned away in fright, and clattered down the street in her high heels. Beirut was back to being a prosperous Phoenician entrepot.

  The envelope with the prince’s documents was gone. So were the three gruesome photos, the German passport, every other piece of identity real or false, and my money.

  Either Nabil was wrong about Mousavi being dead or someone was still trying to drive me over the edge.

  CHAPTER 34

  Geneva, Switzerland

  ANOTHER ADVANTAGE TO DELUXE ACCOMMODATIONS:
Everyone is too polite to mention the obvious. Anywhere else in the world the glowing-red bruise up the right side of my face would have gotten me sent around to the service entrance with the help, but the desk clerk at the Beau Rivage actually smiled when I walked up to his white-marble-and-gilt counter.

  “I have a reservation,” I said, pulling out the fifteen thousand dollars Yuri’s Russian partner had sent me off with. “If you don’t mind, I’ll be paying in cash.” That loan I’d forgiven Yuri almost twenty years earlier had turned out to be the best investment of my life.

  The desk clerk took a five-thousand-dollar deposit without a murmur and gave me a room facing the lake.

  The room was everything a five-star rating promises. The basket of fruit spilled over with kiwis, apples, blood oranges, even pomegranates. Orchids ascended elegantly out of an exquisite Japanese pot. A vase of tulips. Linen sheets—at least an 800 thread count. The bathroom had a walk-in shower with two heads on each side and a bench.

  I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, telling myself I’d need only a fifteen-minute nap. It was dark when I woke up. The traffic along the quai in front of the hotel was light now. I checked my watch: a little after midnight. Another fifteen minutes, I told myself. I woke with a start to daylight: six-thirty. For a moment, I thought Murtaza Ali Mousavi had been a dream, but the dull ache in my head was anything but spectral.

  Mousavi, or whoever it was in the prince’s Range Rover, had been right. The truth hadn’t set me free. I was more ensnared in it than ever, but in an odd way, my one-sided meeting with the man I had been chasing for nearly two decades had freed me from the past. Bill’s murder wasn’t avenged, but somehow I could begin to focus everything I had on what waited ahead, not on what lay behind. It was time to act. I reached over and dialed O’Neill’s number without leaving the bed. He answered on the first ring.

  “Did it arrive?”

  “Did what arrive?”

  “The package from Beirut.”

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t get a package from you.”

  They’d gotten to the Albergo manager, convinced him to turn over the documents, mugged the bellhop, burned down the Aramex office, blown up its plane. Possibilities were endless.

  “What about the e-mail?”

  “I got an e-mail from the Albergo. What was that about?”

  “When I get to New York, I’ll show you how to read it. You gotta get me in the U.S. I’m on U.N. docs. Phonies.”

  Fortunately, I’d caught Yuri on his cell phone. He was in Urumqi, China. It took all of ten minutes after I called him for one of his Russian partners to get to the Albergo and another two hours for the partner to secure the U.N. refugee laissez-passer. I would have preferred a good-quality forged passport, but that took time, and time I didn’t have.

  “What in the fuck have you got yourself into now?” O’Neill asked.

  “Here. Write this down. Joseph Konrad—Konrad with a K—K O Z E N I O W S K I. Can you get me in?”

  “How the hell did you come up with that name?”

  I’d asked the Russian partner the same question when he handed me the laissez-passer. “Patron saint of dark hearts” was all he answered, but I was in no position to argue. I did say no when he tried to send me to Bratislava. Geneva it had to be. No other options. He needed another four hours to get the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to agree to get the Swiss to agree. By the time Yuri’s partner reserved me a room at the Beau Rivage, my head hurt too much to argue.

  “Can you get me in?” I asked O’Neill again.

  “I don’t know.”

  “John, I used to parole people through immigrations all the time. Do it. I’ve got evidence of an ex-colleague making a killing using foreknowledge of terrorist attacks.”

  I didn’t. Or maybe I really did. The point was to do what I had to do as quickly as possible and get out of Geneva, show up in New York, and drop everything in O’Neill’s lap.

  “Your kind of evidence, not mine,” I added. O’Neill didn’t laugh, and I didn’t have to drive the point home. The way the FBI worked, there had to be the hard promise of a collar before they would even consider paroling someone into the country on an alias passport.

  “You already have a lot of the stuff in the e-mail I sent,” I continued. “And I’m about to put my hands on a lot more.” Another promise I wondered if I could keep.

  “I’ll get our guy in Paris to come down and see you.”

  “No, the deal is I give it to you in New York.”

  O’Neill had been grinding his teeth at the other end of the line loud enough to let me know how put out he was. “Let me see,” he finally said.

  I called India an hour earlier than I promised myself I would.

  “Max? You woke me up.”

  “I need to ask you something.”

  “Are you out of Lebanon?”

  “Is your father really having financial problems?” I asked, ignoring her question.

  “Call me back on my cell,” India said, and hung up.

  She answered on the first ring.

  “Sorry,” she said. Her voice had gone from sleepy to downcast. “I didn’t want Simon listening in. Or Dad.”

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  “You can’t believe what’s happening here. He was on the phone all night talking to Saudi Arabia, trying to raise money. There’s a bunch of margin calls he can’t make. I can’t stand being here. By the way, where are you?”

  “Switzerland. Why don’t you call Michelle Zwanzig and ask her what’s going on. You wouldn’t believe what people tell their fiduciaries.”

  “I already know. Channing screwed him. The bas—”

  “Did Michelle tell you that?”

  “No. I read Dad’s e-mails. Max, it’s awful. He could go to jail.” I heard a muffled sob.

  “You don’t have an inkling of what he’s up to?”

  “He locks himself in the library. Whenever he comes out, he says that it’s going to be okay, that he’s about to close on a big deal.”

  If she only knew. Listening to India, I now was close to convinced that Frank Beckman had gotten rich from tip-offs on terrorist attacks. KSM lets Frank know about a plane about to go down, and Frank shorts the company that owns it. A tanker is about to go up in the Straits of Hormuz, and Frank goes long on crude futures. The newspaper stories would cast it as part of the ideological struggle between Islam and the West, but for Frank it was the oldest story of all: money. But I wasn’t going to air this over the phone with India.

  “You need to confront Michelle. My bet is she knows what’s going on.” Saying that made me think of something. “By the way, do you have any accounts with her?”

  “One or two. I have no idea what’s in them. Dad set them up, and he stored some of my stuff with her. Trust papers, wills. That sort of thing. She has it in her office, I think, in some sort of safe-deposit box.”

  “Come here, then. To Geneva. Tell her you need to look at it. Maybe some of your dad’s stuff is in the same box, and you’ll figure out what’s going on. Maybe something that will shed light on Channing, too. You’re a client, India. You have a right.”

  “I don’t know. She’ll call Dad. Anyhow, I don’t have any idea where the key to the box is.”

  “There’s a key?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “You need to know the truth, India. I can’t tell you on the phone, but you need—”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Just come here tonight.” I was almost begging now.

  “Tonight? Max, I can’t! I have duty Saturday. There’s dinner at home that night. It’s with—”

  “India, I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. Try. Think about it. Call me at the Beau Rivage if you can’t make it.” I gave her the name I was registered under. “Otherwise I’ll be at the airport.”

  “You don’t like to give a girl much time to think about her wardrobe, do you?”

  “And India…
”

  “More?”

  “Find the key.”

  My next call was to the concierge.

  “Michelle Zwanzig. Can you find me her address and telephone number?” I’d lost her card along with everything else.

  He called back in five minutes. “Unfortunately, sir, it’s unlisted.”

  “Are you downstairs?”

  I found the concierge, pulled him aside, and slipped him five hundred dollars to find out her address from the police. An old girlfriend, I explained, hoping to make the task more palatable. I added that I was in town on short notice and wanted to surprise her. I was pretty sure he’d come back with the number. Switzerland is a country of snitches, and concierges are all tight with the cops.

  Back in my room, I was flipping through the TV channels when I heard a tap on the door. The concierge was as efficient as the rest of the hotel. Michelle Zwanzig’s office was on the other side of the lake just off Rue du Puits-Saint-Pierre. That would put it just behind the Hotel Les Armures, where Marissa and I had once stayed in better days, before we were married. We always thought Rikki had been conceived there, proof that sperm and egg can’t be too drunk to find each other.

  “A hotel car, sir?”

  “What? No.” I was too distracted at the moment to even think of giving him a tip, but I immediately regretted it. His inclination would be to file a report with the police about me—the passive aggression of the servant class. I caught up with him in the service stairs and pressed another hundred into his palm.

  To pass the time, I went downstairs to the business office, sat down at one of the guest computers, and logged on. I wasn’t expecting anything more from O’Neill except perhaps an instant response that he couldn’t parole me into the U.S. or anywhere else on Planet Earth. Instead, there was a message sent from Marissa’s address, marked “Urgent” in the subject line. What now? I wondered. What in the middle of all this? It had to be money. I felt like shit when I read it.