Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  My intuition was looking better and better: Like some incorrigible capitalist Delphic oracle, Frank had built his fortune by seeing into the future.

  Trouble was, after a while, he started tapping other sources of information. Half a dozen times, when his Saudi partners went long on oil, he went short and got creamed.

  “I know,” India said, catching my glance. “I’m curious how Dad and his partners bet against the market and got it right so often.”

  Actually, I didn’t think there was any question about it now: insider trading. Channing’s networks fit right into their uncanny success.

  “How do you know all this?” I asked. She was just out of college. It wasn’t the sort of research a daughter usually undertakes on her father.

  “I already told you. I read his e-mails and faxes. He’s all I’ve got; I have no choice but to be interested.”

  It served my interests, too, I thought.

  “So what’s he going to do?” I asked.

  “He’s playing the spot oil market hard.”

  “With his Saudi friend?”

  “Not this time. With David Channing. The trades are in Dad’s name to hide Channing’s hand.”

  “Did you ever hear the name BT Trading?”

  “No. Never.”

  India and I talked until six in the morning, running through all the possibilities. We both knew we weren’t getting anywhere.

  “Did you find the key to the safe-deposit box?” I finally asked her.

  “Keys,” she corrected. “They were in Dad’s desk drawer—two of them.”

  “Bring them with you?”

  She nodded.

  “Get dressed,” I said, throwing the sheets back.

  I had coffee sent up while she washed and dressed.

  From Cornivan, Geneva’s main railroad station, to Annemasse is a twenty-minute trolley ride. The trolley passes through a border crossing, but neither the Swiss nor the French bother checking passengers.

  In Annemasse, we took a taxi to Bons-en-Chablis, a French village that had yet to be gentrified. It probably wouldn’t be for a long time because you couldn’t see Lac Léman from any part of it. The taxi dropped us in front of Electromanager du Lac, a well-known fence for illegal arms.

  I’d never been in the store before, but as with Carthage Voyages, I’d read about the place in cable traffic. Geneva station and the French police independently used it to keep tabs on anything from arms to stolen plutonium. It was a nice deal for Jean-Marc, the owner; he got protection for his fencing in return for passing on an occasional tip.

  Jean-Marc emerged from the back room when he heard the bell above the door ring. A slight man, maybe forty, with horn-rim glasses and a tweed coat, he didn’t look much like a black-arms dealer.

  “I work with Pat,” I said, sticking my hand across the counter to shake his.

  Pat Graner was the chief in Basle, Jean-Marc’s case officer.

  “He should have called.”

  “I know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders in apology. “No problem. Call him now if you like.”

  I knew it was Pat’s habit not to get into the office on Saturday until after eleven.

  “Where are we?” India asked when Jean-Marc slipped behind the curtain, no doubt to make sure I really worked with Pat.

  “This guy’s an informant,” I said.

  “Oh, fuck, I might as well go home and resign.”

  “They’ll never know you were here.”

  “What are we doing?”

  “Finding out why your dad’s in trouble.”

  “Here?”

  “No. At Michelle Zwanzig’s.”

  “Max?”

  Jean-Marc was back before I could respond. He must have decided not to call Pat after all. “How can I help you?”

  Jean-Marc didn’t flinch when I asked him for a spin dialer, an ultrasound generator, and a five-inch pneumatic gun.

  “Max?” India asked again when he disappeared. More of an edge this time. As if she could hear glass breaking in the distance.

  “Props.”

  “No, seriously.”

  “Break-in stuff.”

  “Christ almighty, I’m outta here.” She actually turned around to leave, but she didn’t resist when I took hold of her wrist.

  “It’s not like we’re going to use it against someone we don’t know. It’s your dad’s own office.”

  “Forget it. Sneaking over the border into Lebanon was one thing; breaking and entering is entirely different.”

  “You’re not going in; I am.”

  CHAPTER 36

  AT A LITTLE AFTER FOUR that Saturday afternoon, I rang the rez-de-chaussée bell. No answer. I rang it again.

  India watched from across the street, leaning against an arch. A knapsack at her feet, she looked like a well-heeled college backpacker in Switzerland on summer vacation; I looked like a Gastarbeiter in a blue monkey suit. I turned and gave her a smile as I rang the doorbell once more, then pointed to the arch and watched as she ducked out of sight. There was no answer. This time I rang the third-floor doorbell, Zwanzig’s office. It was Saturday; Zwanzig wouldn’t be there—fiduciary agents never work on Saturdays. After five minutes of this, I pulled the cordless drill out of my pouch and jammed the bit in the keyway. The pins sheared off one after the other. The racket reverberated up and down the cobblestone street, but no one paid attention. I was just another locksmith replacing a broken lock on a weekend call.

  Once the lock gave and I was inside, I pulled out the cylinder and replaced it with another one. The clerk at the hardware store, the same one who sold me the drill and the monkey suit, assured me that all the cylinders for this particular lock were the same. He was right. I loved the Swiss.

  When I was through, I went back outside, let the door lock behind me, and tried the new key. Aces. Now I was the only one who could get inside the building. I couldn’t see India now, but I was sure she was there, just where we’d talked about. She wasn’t happy about it, but at least she’d agreed: If an alarm went off outside the building or if she heard the police coming, she was to shoot the gun at the third-floor window, Michelle’s office, then walk away.

  India had laughed when I’d walked across the Quai du Mont-Blanc a half hour earlier carrying a dead pigeon in a plastic bag. She’d thought I’d gone completely nuts, and when I began stuffing the bird down the barrel of the pneumatic gun to show her how it worked, she was sure of it. But she understood when I explained. If an alarm goes off and the police come, the smashed glass and dead pigeon explain the alarm: a simple avian flight malfunction. It wouldn’t take care of the closed-circuit camera, but I figured we’d be out of Switzerland before anyone checked the feed.

  “I’m going to shoot a dead bird at a window?”

  “That’s how it works, dear. The good news is that no policeman in Switzerland would have the nerve to haul you in for it. He’d be laughed off the force. Just be sure to clear the area before the police actually arrive.”

  As the pigeon gun suggests, this wasn’t exactly a professional break-in. To do that you need a hundred people on the street: a ten- to twelve-person surveillance team watching each and every person with twenty-four-hour access to the building just in case someone makes a surprise visit to the target site, and a dozen other watchers with radios on the approaching streets in case the police answered a silent alarm you didn’t know about. And then there’s the actual team: a specialist for electric alarms, another for motion detectors, a safe cracker. I had to work with what I had.

  I let myself in again and walked up to the third floor. Zwanzig’s lock gave up as easily as the one downstairs, and I didn’t have to worry about replacing it. The big question now was what was waiting inside. Normally, a break-in crew sticks a fiber-optic probe under the door to take a look around for the alarm system. Jean-Marc didn’t have one, and I didn’t have a week to wait for him to get one. Instead, the hope was that the ultrasound generator would disable a motion detector. Open the d
oor slowly. Push the generator through. Turn it on. Pray. I did. There was no alarm, or at least no audible one. And I was inside.

  As I suspected, Zwanzig’s office was as neat as a pin: a wall of three-ring binders, two tasteful etchings, a kid leather couch and matching chair, and in the corner a four-foot-high safe with a dial. I looked everywhere, even behind the pictures and in the closets, but there were no safe-deposit boxes. Either India got it wrong or Zwanzig transferred her clients’ paper into the safe. Now I would have to try my luck with the safe. I attached the dialer and started it spinning.

  In the meantime, I went to look for Zwanzig’s computer. Her drawers were as tidy as the rest of her office, pencils neatly aligned in one compartment, pens in another. But no computer, no laptop, no Palm Pilot, no nothing. I went through all the closets. Nothing there, either. The spin dialer was still spinning—running through all the possible combinations could take a couple hours. While I was waiting, I started in on the three-ring binders.

  The labels on the outside all seemed to be about watering holes for posh souls: San Remo, Gstaad, and on and on. Inside the folders, though, the contents had nothing to do with vacations. The first thing I came to in the Gstaad folder was a telefax from Zwanzig to UBS AG, the Swiss mega-bank, ordering the transfer of six million dollars from a numbered account in Venezuela to a Qatari prince’s account. The entire binder was full of similar transfers, some for even more money, some for much more. I pulled down the binders one after another looking for transfers connected to either Frank or Channing. I even looked for something with Webber’s name on it.

  I heard the spin dialer click. It had picked up the first number of the safe combination. I stood watching it as number two caught. Number three fell in place another minute later. I pulled down the handle and the safe swung open.

  I didn’t know what to expect, but if Michelle Zwanzig had left the kind of stuff I’d found in the binders in open view, she had to have something pretty incredible sitting on those shelves in front of me, maybe even the keystone I was looking for, the one that would nail down my suspicions with facts.

  On the top shelf of the safe was an eighteen-page computer-generated sheet of “calls,” option swaps and credits to banks. I quickly skimmed through them. They were all related to oil futures, oil service companies, oil companies. Whoever owned the calls was paying only two cents on the dollar. If Halliburton stock rose more than ten dollars, the owner was going to make a fortune. If the price of oil went up five dollars, Exxon was a gold mine.

  I kept looking, still sure there had to be something related to airline stocks. But there wasn’t. I rifled through the paper on the shelf underneath. Nothing about airline options there, either. So much for my theory about a reprise of KSM’s plane-bombing scheme. Instead, I found a dozen letters from David Channing, instructing that profits from calls be paid to a score of accounts around the world. I looked for anything with BT Trading on it, but there had to be six inches of paper on that shelf. It would take me at least an hour to go through it.

  I’d started looking through the papers when the window behind me shattered. The pigeon didn’t make it through—I’d thought the bird was too light—but the broken glass was all I needed. I couldn’t hear a klaxon. But India had to be warning me that the police were on the way.

  I jammed as much paper as I could from the safe into a plastic shopping bag I’d brought along, then pulled off the spin dialer and stuffed it in the safe along with the ultrasound generator, the monkey suit, the drill, and the rest of the stuff I’d come in with. Then I squirted Gorilla Glue into the safe’s key locks and behind the dial. The repair company would scratch its head for a day before it drilled the thing open. More than enough time to get out of Switzerland.

  I ran downstairs and out the front door and almost tripped on something. I looked down and saw a woman in her seventies with a beet-red face and a bleached Heidi haircut. She was maybe five feet tall and not even a hundred pounds. She had a key in her right hand.

  “La clef ne marche plus”—the key doesn’t work anymore—she said, looking at me for an explanation.

  Just as I recognized the voice behind the squawk box, she took a hard look at me.

  “C’est vous!” she screamed. She pulled a cell phone out of her purse and screamed into it even before dialing. “I’ve caught a thief! I’ve caught a thief!” People on the street stopped to look at her, and then me. I considered running but I knew that within a block I’d have a hundred people after me.

  I looked behind me to make sure India had taken off. I couldn’t see her.

  “Thief!” the woman screamed. There was a crowd gathering around us.

  I was about ready to surrender when I heard India’s voice. “What are you saying?” she yelled as she pushed her way through.

  The woman turned around, surprised that anyone would dare interfere with the course of Swiss justice.

  “Leave him alone. You’re crazy,” India said.

  “He—”

  “He didn’t do anything,” India said, her voice now calmer. India’s French was flawless.

  “Mais—”

  “Mais merde! We’re here waiting for Ms. Michelle Zwanzig. Floor three. Private Investment Services. She represents my family.” There was something almost regal in her manner. She expected an apology—no question about it. Now.

  “Give me your cell phone and talk to her yourself,” she said, her voice now back to normal.

  The woman dialed a number, no doubt Zwanzig’s home. India took the phone from her.

  “Michelle, it’s India. India Beckman. Dad wanted me to come see you…. Yes…No, I don’t know why. Documents for your safekeeping, I suppose. I have them with me. Dad told me this time; he must have thought you would be here. We’d been ringing your bell. The downstairs door was open. My friend went inside to see if he could ring up to your office. And now this lady is accusing him of breaking in. She’s insufferable.” She was actually stamping her foot as she said it. “Would you mind talking to her?”

  India handed the phone to the woman.

  “Yes, madam…yes, madam…You’re sure you know the young lady? Of course, thank you, madam.”

  She put her phone back in her purse, looked at the two of us, certain something was not right, and apologized.

  As she watched us in puzzlement, we walked down the hill arm in arm, me with my shopping bag crammed with who knows what, India with her backpack minus the pigeon gun. Somewhere in the ether overhead, I was certain, Frank Beckman and Michelle Zwanzig were in earnest conversation. We had to get out of Switzerland fast.

  CHAPTER 37

  I WAS ON THE COUCH, watching India packing, when there was a knock on the door.

  “Service,” a muffled voice said.

  I looked at India. She shrugged her shoulders to tell me she hadn’t ordered anything. It couldn’t be the Swiss police. It was too soon for them to have figured out what happened.

  “Service, s’il vous plait”

  “Un instant,” I said.

  I motioned for India to go into the bathroom and close the door. Then I turned off the lights and drew the curtains. I knew the interior. I was betting whoever was in the hall didn’t. I crouched low beside the door and threw the latch. As soon as I turned the knob, the door flew open with a hard kick and someone threw himself into the room. I swung my leg around in an arc and caught him in the shins. His momentum carried him across the room. I could hear the crack of a chair leg breaking over by the windows. I was on him, my foot in his crotch, by the time he recovered and tried to scramble to his feet. One downward thrust, and he lay still on the floor, panting. The door to the hall must have banged against the wall so hard it closed again. The room was still too dark for me to see who I’d pinned to the floor.

  “Was she a good fuck?” Raspy, through clenched teeth, but I’d know Frank Beckman’s voice anywhere. He must have already been in Geneva when he got the call from Michelle. How he found India and me so quickly I had no
idea.

  I stepped hard on his crotch. This time he screamed until I eased up.

  “I said. Was she a good fuck?” He was breathing hard, gasping.

  “Frank, I just want to know one thing: Did you know why you were buying airline puts in 1994?”

  The puts were a hunch. Until I had the time to go through the documents from Michelle’s safe, I wouldn’t know for sure Frank was into them. Still, it was a bluff that couldn’t hurt.

  “Fuck you.”

  “You don’t care that you have blood on your hands,” I said.

  “Let me up.”

  “Let’s try another question….”

  “Fuck you.”

  “What is it now, tankers, refineries?”

  “Let me the fuck up.”

  I stepped harder on his crotch. He screamed again.

  “Who’s running Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, you or Channing?” I yelled.

  Frank didn’t respond this time.

  “You got Webber to frame me. You knew I was getting close with the photo, that one day I’d find out KSM took it, that he was your inside guy.”

  I was talking mostly to myself by then. Maybe I’d been doing that all along. Frank had passed out somewhere along the way. He wasn’t making a noise. I took my foot off him. A few minutes later he started to stir, groaning. It was clear he wasn’t going to talk. I bent over him, patted him down. I was thinking of that Beretta he’d bought to kill India’s stepfather with. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d brought it with him on this trip, too. What else are private jets for?