Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  “I thought about it,” he said, reading my mind. His body was limp, jelly.

  “You’d be better off thinking what your next move is. One is: Don’t think about going to the Swiss police. I’ll lay it out right here. I’ve already e-mailed Danny Pearl at the Wall Street Journal with half the story. I get rolled up and he gets the rest. Move two, you stop whatever is going down: airplanes, refineries. If you don’t, it’ll be a cinch tying you to it with the paper I got.”

  When I was through, I pulled him up, half carried him to the door, and pushed him out into the hall.

  Then I opened the door to the bathroom. India lay curled on the floor, sobbing.

  CHAPTER 38

  I WENT DOWNSTAIRS to the business center and called Chris Corsini.

  “It’s me, Max.”

  “Why are you bothering me? I thought we had an agreement that you got your last favor.”

  “Here, take down this number.” I read off Webber’s cell phone number, the one he had given me my last day at headquarters, the same one I’d already given Chris to get Webber’s calls. “Do a quick credit check on him. Call me back with his bank and bank account number.”

  “This isn’t legal, is it?”

  “It’s okay. I owe the guy money and I lost his financial coordinates. If I don’t make the transfer today, I’m cooked.”

  “Right. I think I’ve heard that before, too.”

  But Chris called back right on cue, ten minutes later.

  “Whoever Webber is, he has only one bank account, domestically and in his name at least: the Bank of America in Falls Church.” He gave me the number.

  “One more favor, Chris. I’m running out of time. Look up the IRS’s fax number in Philadelphia.”

  “Jesus, Max, what are you up to?”

  “You don’t—”

  “You’re right. I really don’t.” Happily, he seemed to have the IRS number on his Rolodex.

  As soon as I hung up with Chris, I pulled out a three-by-five card I’d grabbed at the last minute from Michelle Zwanzig’s office: the pin code to her UBS account. It had been taped to the inside of the safe door. Using it, I logged onto her account and transferred twelve million dollars from David Channing’s Morgan Stanley account to Webber’s checking account at the Bank of America in Falls Church, Virginia. I printed a copy of the transfer and faxed it to the IRS.

  Next, I called John O’Neill, hoping he, too, was still speaking to me.

  “Can I get back in?” I asked him. “I gotta see you now.”

  “JFK okay?”

  “I’ll see you there.”

  “I won’t be at the airport. A friend, though.”

  “Okay. But this can’t wait.”

  “One other thing: I got you immunity.”

  “What for?”

  “You know. Millis. But that doesn’t mean they can’t tag you. If there’s any chance of cleaning up your act, do it now.”

  Too late for that.

  “John—”

  “Oh, no…”

  “One last request ever.”

  “I mean it. You’re like the clap, like some herpes virus. You just keep mutating and erupting all over the place.”

  “I need a meeting. Justice. CIA. FBI. Set it up, will ya?”

  “Fucking nuts,” O’Neill said as he hung up.

  I’d lied to Frank; I hadn’t e-mailed Danny Pearl anything. But I did now. David Channing’s options buys. Not enough to write a story, but if anything happened to me, Pearl would never let the story go.

  When I got back to the room, India’s bag was waiting by the door, but she was gone. I was lying on the sofa two hours later when she let herself back in. She looked as if she’d been crying for days.

  “I have to leave.”

  “I know,” I told her. I tried to put my arms around her, but she backed away. “Our flight’s in—”

  “Now, Max. Now. I can’t stay here anymore.”

  “What did he say?”

  “A lot. He’s giving me forty-eight hours to get my things out of the house.”

  “It’s time for you to move out, anyhow.”

  “Yeah, but not this way.”

  CHAPTER 39

  NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL

  WASHINGTON, DC 20504

  INFORMATION

  MEMORANDUM FOR CONDOLEEZZA RICE

  FROM: RICHARD CLARKE

  SUBJECT: PRESIDENTIAL POLICY INITIATIVE/REVIEW—THE MIDDLE EAST: NEW CHALLENGES, NEW OPPORTUNITIES

  CONDI, WE CONTINUE TO NEED IN THE MOST PRESSING WAY A PRINCIPALS LEVEL REVIEW OF THE ADMINISTRATION’S APPROACH TO MIDDLE EAST POLICY, BOTH IN ITS BROAD FOR MULATION AND IN ITS SPECIFICS. GOD’S IN THE DETAILS….

  HE BARKED OUT A NUMBER, listened to it convert, waited for the ring. Beyond the window, acres and acres of sagebrush rolled down to Sun Valley in the distance.

  “Institute for a Fair Peace. Donald Sherley’s office.”

  The man had a secretary answer his cell phone?

  “Institute for Fuck-All. David Channing’s office.” He spoke in a high, mincing voice.

  Sherley was on in an instant.

  “David!”

  “The memo is idiotic, for crissake. I-di-ot-ic!”

  “Now, David—”

  “‘New Challenges, New Opportunities’? How about ‘Do We Really Need to Let the Crazies Take Over the Middle East?’”

  “I hardly—”

  “And the figures for the Shia are all wrong. Kuwait thirty percent? Change it to fifty-two percent. Who the hell’s going to know. Certainly not State or the limp-dick CIA. Same for Iraq. Round the sixty-two-point-five percent up to seventy. The Saudis? Three-point-three percent Shia? Can’t anyone do math? Make it fourteen percent and add a footnote in twenty-four-point Helvetica bold that the Saudi Shia sit on ninety percent of Saudi oil. And drop Qatar. A cat’s litter box I don’t give a shit about.”

  “Our litter box, David.”

  “You fucking dope. I don’t know why I give your pathetic goddamn institute a single penny.”

  He threw the memo across the room, pages flying in every direction; sent his red pen scudding after them.

  “Jesse!”

  One, two, three, four…Jesse showed up in five seconds flat, the gold standard. He loved the man, loved the effect of the full-butler outfit and his chalky black skin against the seamless, concrete-gray walls, loved the way Jesse was framed just now in one of the large angular windows. He loved Idaho in this late-summer light; loved the cold evenings, the wolves he could hear howling late into the night; loved the fact that Jesse was not fucking his wife the way Nils had been fucking her. (Not cause enough, of course, to dismiss Nils—the man was a brilliant pilot—but he would have to pay the piper eventually.)

  “Jesse, have you been studying your catechism?”

  “Yes, sir. Indeed, I have.”

  “Wonderful. Wonderful! Take a seat!”

  He did, in a severe side chair centered beneath a Chuck Close self-portrait: huge, hugely ugly. A Donald Judd sculpture—a vast peaked monolith—stood against the blank wall opposite him. Channing paced back and forth in front of him like a deranged schoolmaster.

  “The key to long-term stability in the Middle East, Jesse, is…”

  “Destabilization of the existing status quo, sir.”

  “To be replaced by…?”

  “Shia republics from Iraq to Oman, sir.”

  “Contained by…?”

  David Channing heard some kind of jangling coming from one of the nearby spaces, the click click click of heels on the heart pine floors. His wife.

  “Go away,” he shouted out.

  The heels kept clicking, kept coming in his direction, like a goddamn tsunami. He waited until she was almost in sight to speak again.

  “That decrepit motel next to the ski lift—I want you to go over there right now and buy the closest unit to the lift. I want the parking space. I’m sick of having to haul my skis all that goddamn way every winter.”

&n
bsp; “Did you have a figure in mind?” Vanessa Channing’s voice was pure honey—she hated hauling her skis, too. She’d been lobbying for one of the ex-motel-unit condos all summer long.

  “A hundred ninety-five thousand. Not a penny more.”

  “Good luck,” she said.

  “Two hundred and fifty, then. You and Nils can use the condo for a love nest.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “If only I could.”

  Vanessa signaled Jesse to disappear, but he was already halfway to the kitchen wing. Something had to be done—canapés made, pillows plumped, the cook weaned off his cocaine, at least for the evening. Guests were coming: an ex-ambassador, an ex–movie star, an ex-senator. That’s how she thought of Sun Valley: the land of exes, of honorables, of once-had-beens. She wanted to throw up half the time she was here.

  “You’re pathetic, David.”

  She was wearing jeans, a denim work shirt, enough diamonds to buckle the fingers of a weaker woman.

  “Me?” he screamed. “Me? Donald Judd is pathos? Glenn Close, Chuck Close, whatever the fuck his name is—that’s pathos? Nine pages in Architectural Digest is pathos? Look out that window. Look all the way to Sun Valley. I could buy it all!”

  “Aren’t we forgetting that Daddy’s money is about dried up? That you’ve run through it like goose fat through a dog? Thank God he died when he did.”

  “Shut up. Shut up! What about the voice-recognition company?”

  “Shitty hardware,” Vanessa said. “You’ve heard how the damn thing grinds away. Shitty software. The company’s in the tank.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Of course it is. I read the financials. Someone around here has to actually understand a balance sheet.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “Michelle talks to me, David. I’m the one she does talk to. I don’t treat her like a rug.”

  He was picking up the memo pages scattered across the floor, collating them, stacking the pages together as he went.

  “I’ve got work to do,” he said as he stood up.

  “Your little institute?”

  He’d turned, was walking away. She put a hand on his shoulder and spun him around.

  “Your pretensions, David, are sickening.”

  “What?”

  “Your butler-in-livery. Your Jew-baiting. Your Harvard-is-shit. It’s all sickening. Don’t you understand, David? You’re a garden-variety bigot all wrapped up in big theories. And now you’re going under because you don’t understand diddly-squat about making money.”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “You lost Oliver’s money. Every penny.”

  Somehow Vanessa had grabbed the Times off the table and rolled it up without his seeing her do it. She hit him with it once on the side of his face and once on his ear. When he looked up again, she’d turned to leave, her heels click-clicking.

  The bitch.

  He walked down a long, cork-lined hallway until he came to his desk and, beyond it, nothing but blue sky through the floor-to-ceiling window. A plasma screen rose like Lazarus out of the ash-black desktop. He studied the oil quotes, short and long trades, spot prices, wet buys: a day out, a week out, a year out.

  Channing had just finished when the fax he kept locked in his wall safe (the safe encased in tons of concrete, the concrete reinforced by hundreds of yards of stainless-steel tie-rods) began to chime. He could hear the fax humming, gurgling softly. When it was through, he spun the dials and picked out a single page, handwritten, as beautiful as any Michelangelo:

  …followed by a string of numbers. The numbers looked randomly generated, but he would bet his wife’s plastic surgeon’s bill that they had been prompted by an algorithm written in ten minutes. That’s why his father had nicknamed the man the Genius. No one could do numbers theory like him.

  “He was a supernova, David!” He could hear the old man saying it even now. “His dissertation, non-Riemannian hypersquares, was all of two pages, yet they had to send it around to five universities”—here, his father would always hold up five fingers and fan them just to drive the point home—“five, just to figure out what he was talking about.”

  That was back when he and Dear Papa still talked to each other. The Halcyon Days. Hah.

  David Channing pulled out his Palm Pilot, typed in the sequence of numbers the Genius had faxed, and decoded them: CH3-O-NO2. What the fuck is that? Is he playing a joke?

  He picked up the phone, called Nils, and read off the chemical compound’s notation. Nils had majored in something like that, somewhere in some other country.

  “Methyl nitrate,” Nils said.

  “Hah.”

  Of course. Odorless. Colorless. More powerful than nitroglycerin.

  He wrote a note to himself: “Find out temperature methyl nitrate burns.”

  He thought of his father. The venerable fraud had fancied himself the superior of Acheson, the Dulleses, Kennan, Kissinger. Naturally. Not one of them could see beyond the Soviets; beyond Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin; beyond their ridiculous “dominoes” and containment. Only Oliver Wendell Channing saw the world as it was. Just ask him.

  “Communism lasted seventy years. As a threat, it was around for less than four decades. A smoke-cured ham has a longer shelf life than that. Islam is more than thirteen hundred years old. It’s about something. It has a God. It has true believers, not a corrupt nomenklatura, not apparatchiks.”

  David couldn’t remember anymore if his father had written that or only said it, but my God, he’d heard it all ten thousand times if he’d heard it once. The same song and dance. The portentous tones, like Moses shouting from the Mount. The portentous pose, like Horatio at the bridge, like the little Dutch boy at the dike. (Rhymes with kike.) If ever there was a stuck record, Oliver Wendell Channing was it. But he had to give one thing to the old son of a bitch. All on his own, he’d plugged himself into that primeval muck, the Middle East. He had a Rolodex that wouldn’t stop. But he didn’t have a clue what to do with it. His daddy’s trust fund was just fine.

  “You’re dying, Father.” David could remember the moment, the time, the place exactly. The wine steward was just walking away from the table; their waiter just circling back to them. A hush seemed to have fallen over the dining room of the Harvard Club as if some wraith were floating through. The wraith, in fact, was across the table from him.

  “Of course I’m dying,” his father had answered, collapsed into his suit. “That’s why I’ve asked you here.”

  “What?”

  “Death, David. A last meal, father and son. Everything in—”

  “Set things right?”

  “I couldn’t wait for my own father to die, but we’re…”

  At long last, the old man had handed him the opening he had been looking for forever, and he had no intention of letting it slip from his grasp.

  “Dad, your Don Quixote act never worked for me. All your books—well, they go in the bonfire.”

  Oliver Channing started coughing, spitting something into his napkin.

  “You never understood a fucking thing about the world,” David Channing said, not paying attention. “All those people you fell in love with are savages and will always be savages. All the obscure languages you learned—golden keys to empty rooms. You never had an idea what to do with all those people you collected.”

  Oliver Channing wanted to fight back, but all he could do was muffle the coughs with his napkin. He stopped for a moment, pulled the napkin away, and saw blood. He thought he had days left. Maybe it was just hours.

  “That’s all going to change,” David said. “I’m going to make something out of your life.”

  David Channing could remember folding his napkin, could remember that he was half out of the chair. He could see the wait staff bearing down on them with platters of food when his father finally said it: “You win.” And thus the Genius was his—the still center of the turning dance.

  Channing took the fax a
nd studied the chemical formula one more time, then folded it and fed it into the shredder tucked beneath the desk. His ear still hurt where his wife had hit him.

  CHAPTER 40

  New York City

  O’NEILL WAS AS GOOD as his word. An FBI agent was waiting for us at immigrations. You couldn’t miss him. The loose linen jacket didn’t even pretend to hide the Glock and shoulder holster. With only a hello, he walked India and me through immigrations, customs, and out of the terminal to catch a taxi.

  Both of us were exhausted. India had cried halfway across the Atlantic, until there was nothing left inside her. A death in the family, I told the stewardess when she asked. Wasn’t that right?

  India fell asleep in the taxi heading into the city. I woke her when we got to the Mercer, walked her inside to the lobby, and told her I’d be back for her in a couple hours. She didn’t protest, didn’t say anything. She must have done something like this a hundred times with her father, wait for him to make a meeting, never asking who or why.

  I looked at the address twice, 9 Pell Street, and again at the number above Joe Shanghai’s, a downscale Chinese restaurant in the downscale part of Chinatown. O’Neill had sent word with his FBI baby-sitter that I was to ask for him at the “receptionist.” Easier said than done. I pushed my way through the noon crowd waiting to get in and waved my hand back and forth to get the attention of the young Chinese girl behind the register.

  “I’m here to join Keith.” It was the name I’d been told to ask for. She looked at me dumbly. I figured she didn’t speak a word of English.

  “Keith!” I yelled. “Here?”

  “Keith? Upstairs. Sixth floor.” A flawless Brooklyn accent.

  I hit the steps. A lawyer’s office took up the entire second floor. Above that, the building was all apartments. The place was eerily quiet after the hubbub down below. I got to the fifth floor and that was it. No sixth, but there were stairs to the roof and the door wasn’t locked, so I opened it and walked out. O’Neill grabbed my shoulder from behind.