Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  “Three buildings that way,” he said, pointing across the roofs.

  I heard him slap a padlock on the door I’d just come through. No one could get out on the roof now unless he’d brought along an axe or a sledge hammer.

  Three buildings down, just as advertised, we clambered back inside. Again, O’Neill locked the door behind us, then led me to a third-floor apartment. The place was bare except for a table in the living room with four chairs around it. I looked in the kitchen. The refrigerator door was open. Cabinet doors were open and empty, too. The whole place reeked.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked.

  “NYPD,” O’Neill said, sitting down at the table. “I still have friends there.”

  “That wasn’t an answer.”

  “Somebody’s all over me,” he said.

  “Like?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You sound like me. You’ll tell me if you want. Did you get the meeting set up?”

  He nodded. A surprise. I thought I’d run that well dry, too.

  “Tomorrow,” he said.

  “We’ll go down together.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Don’t tell me you got something more important to do.”

  “July eighth was my KMA.”

  “KMA?”

  “Kiss-my-ass day. Twenty-five years in the Bureau. And I took it. I retired August twenty-second.”

  “What the hell do you mean? You were in Beirut just—”

  “On my own hook.”

  “All the bitching about the embassy?”

  “It’s called creative reality, Max. I paid for the fucking bodyguards, too.”

  “I don’t get it. Why?”

  “Because someone had to tell you face-to-face, you stupid CIA fuck, that your ass was in the wringer.”

  “You flew to Beirut on your own dime just to do that?” I still didn’t get it. I was sure O’Neill had a heart, but it wasn’t of gold.

  “Maybe I started to believe you, too. I told you, you’re making me as crazy as you are. And goddammit, if you have to know the truth, bin Laden’s going to hit us. Out or in, I’ll never let it drop.”

  “Wait a minute. My immunity, how did you—”

  “I left, Max. My friends didn’t. I’ve got a few favors I can call in.”

  This was a showstopper. O’Neill was the one guy I’d really walked through this stuff—months of explanation, of cajoling and convincing, down the drain.

  “Don’t sweat it. You have the paper. You’ll do just fine.”

  He pushed a stuffed manila envelope across the bare tabletop. I could make out the outline of one of those plastic CD cases on top.

  “Your e-mail. Too bad I never got past the lobby at the Albergo. Those photos make the place look almost civilized. I take it the docs are there.”

  “No one’s going to understand this stuff on its own. I need a live body to back me up.”

  “You want the truth? I was forced out. They don’t want me there, no matter what I have to say. I’m not invited to this game.”

  The wheels had started to come off the previous summer, O’Neill said, when his briefcase was stolen at a retirement seminar in Orlando—“from the goddamned conference room with a dozen agents sitting around. That was one hell of a miraculously lucky thief. Amazingly, the fucking thing popped up a few hours later with nothing gone.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me when I saw you in Beirut?”

  “I was still getting used to the idea. Things got really strange after I started asking around about your two Saudis in San Diego.”

  “Strange?”

  “Yeah, strange. Webber went apeshit, denied everything, went straight to the acting director, complaining that I was spying on the Agency.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t know. I never talked to him about it, but just about then someone at the Bureau gave my file to the New York Times. There were…irregularities.”

  “You could have fought it. Told the truth.”

  “Fuck you and the truth, Waller. But if you got to have it again, there was a money problem. Nothing big. Just big enough.”

  O’Neill always insisted on paying when I came up to New York. I’d always assumed those doubles at Elaine’s were going on the Bureau’s tab. Maybe not.

  “The perfect tempest in a teapot,” O’Neill sighed. “The fuckheads won’t stop chewing on it. I thought I heard some kind of echo on my phone this morning.”

  “John, the only time you can hear a tap on your phone is when the Bangladeshis are doing it.”

  I’m sure it was my imagination, but O’Neill looked smaller.

  “You’ll love this,” he said. “Less than twelve hours after I packed my stuff out, the Agency finally cabled us about the two Saudis.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “One of the guys looking for them told me.”

  “Looking? You mean they’re missing?”

  “Yep, as of 0900 this morning neither the FBI nor the CIA has any idea where they are. Hard to believe. The day after I walk out the door, that pack of bastards you used to work for tells us. You can’t make this shit up.”

  “What about the Applied Science surveillance?”

  “No clue. Oh, by the way, I was thinking about you. The week before I left, they arrested some dirtbag out in Minneapolis—a Mr. Moussaoui. He was taking flight training. I actually called up and asked if he had blue eyes and red hair. You know, Max, you really are like catching the clap.”

  “Well?”

  “No. He’s French-Algerian. Not a French-speaking Iranian.”

  “Back to basics: Who’s going to be at the D.C. meeting tomorrow?”

  “The guy for the Bureau is Chuck Appleton. Not the sharpest tool in the shed. The Bureau’s line is that with you and me pushing this penny, they don’t want to put any credence in it. DOJ is sending someone from Violent Crimes and Terrorism. He won’t say a word, just listen. I don’t know who the Agency’s sending. But count on it, he won’t be a friendly. Oh, and there’ll be this politico from the National Security Council—Don Sherley. He’ll be chairing the meeting. It’s his first week on the job, maybe his first day.”

  “Don Sherley? What the fuck.”

  O’Neill rolled his eyes, seemingly as amazed as I was.

  I couldn’t believe the guy was back in play. Truth told, I’d thought he’d lost his security clearance for good. He’d been around in the Reagan years, a deputy assistant secretary of defense. Every time he flew to Tel Aviv, Sherley downloaded top secret cables onto his laptop, and each time, Mossad got into the laptop and copied everything. The Bureau thought he’d done it on purpose, but since he never handed any secrets over directly, they couldn’t make a case.

  Sherley had disappeared for a few years at the start of the first Clinton term only to surface again at the helm of a right-wing think tank called the Washington Institute for a Fair Peace in the Middle East. The institute was known for pushing wacky ideas like Arab nationalism equals fascism and democracy was going to bring down the Silk Curtain just like it brought down the Iron Curtain. No one paid it any attention until the blowhard op-ed columnists at the New York Times and Washington Post picked up the refrain. And until the new administration moved into the White House. The institute’s latest hobbyhorse was invading Iraq, turning it over to the Shia, then spreading a Shia revolution down the Arab side of the Gulf.

  O’Neill was reading my mind.

  “You know who funds the institute, don’t you?”

  I didn’t.

  “David Channing. His father gave the seed money. Sonny boy picked it up.”

  “Oh, fuck.”

  They’d more than stacked the decks; they’d dealt themselves all aces. If Sherley was chairing the meeting, he’d be sure to shit on everything I brought to the table.

  “I ain’t going,” I said. “It’s an ambush.”

  “You got one chance. You have to.”

  He
was right. I knew that. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to deliver the prince’s intercepts and the Geneva stuff to Sherley. I might as well burn them right now. I handed O’Neill back the package he’d brought with him, along with the plastic shopping bag of documents from Geneva that I’d been thumbing through on the plane while India sobbed beside me.

  “These are better off with you than me,” I explained. “In New York, they just mug you for money.”

  O’Neill shrugged.

  “Wait a minute.” There was one Geneva document I wanted to keep with me. I fished it out, then gave him the bag again.

  “You know what you’re doing?” he asked.

  I thought I did, maybe for the first time in a long while. But I’d been wrong before.

  “They’ll be in my safe, thirty-fourth floor. Even my new secretary doesn’t have the combination.”

  “Wait a minute. What thirty-fourth floor? What new secretary? I thought you were out on the street.”

  “Me? C’mon. Security chief, World Trade Center. I started this week. Expense account as long as my arm.”

  O’Neill smiled as he said it, but he seemed to be trying to decide something, waging some private battle with himself. I couldn’t tell if he lost or won.

  “Listen. I got an idea,” I said. O’Neill was starting to shift in his chair, ready to leave. “A channel check. When you get back to the office, call the Chatworth Galleries on Sixty-eighth—”

  “That thief’s not out of business?”

  “Tell him you’ve got a package to drop by.”

  “What? I’m selling my Ming vases?”

  “Just do it.”

  “Not until you tell me what for.”

  “You think your phone’s tapped. Let’s see.”

  He grunted, shifted again, then decided to say whatever was on his mind.

  “Max, the guy who met you at the airport told me you’re traveling with someone. Your daughter, he said.”

  “Ex-colleague.”

  “I know who she is. Be careful.”

  “Come on, John. She’s an old friend. I’ve known her since she was a kid.”

  “Did she tell you that she started two weeks ago in the Counter-Espionage Center, working for Webber? I think he’s the guy who framed you.”

  O’Neill went down the stairs with me. I watched him as he walked up Pell. His Buick Regal was parked in front of a fire hydrant.

  CHAPTER 41

  Washington, D.C.

  AT WASHINGTON NATIONAL, I started to take India’s hand as we were walking down the long corridor to the terminal, then decided it wasn’t even worth pretending. I don’t know if she sensed what I’d learned while she was sipping tea at the Mercer, but she smiled so hard, I thought she might start crying again.

  “I’ll call,” I said when we got to the moving ramp over by the Metro stop. I took her hand after all. Maybe O’Neill had the story wrong. Maybe I wanted to touch her one last time.

  “Can’t you tell me where you’re staying?” she asked.

  I paused, then told her. She’d never heard of the place, but the address didn’t impress her.

  “You’ll be okay with those?” She was staring at my carry-on, thinking the documents must still be inside. “I’ll hold them for you if you want.”

  “No,” I said. “Thanks, but you never know when—” There was no need to finish, nor any way to.

  India nodded, turned, and started down the ramp. She wasn’t my mother, though. She turned, waved a big good-bye, even blew me a kiss. I waited until she was out of sight, then found a pay phone and called Willie.

  “Ever hear of this whorehouse on Rhode Island Avenue?”

  CHAPTER 42

  A COP FRIEND HAD INTRODUCED ME a few years earlier to the Amble Inn at 18th Street Northeast and Rhode Island Avenue, maybe forty blocks and five thousand real-estate zones from Frank Beckman’s Tuttle Place mansion. The inn was a sanctioned whorehouse, the only one in D.C. The girls rotated in and out, mostly from up and down the eastern seaboard. The police provided protection and laid down a little covering fire when things got nasty, and everyone did a little business and felt better or worse depending when they were through.

  I wasn’t in the market for what the ladies at the inn and their pimps were selling, and I hadn’t exactly crept back into Washington unannounced, but I still needed to fly under the radar as much as I could, and I figured even the refrigerator was wired in my apartment. The Amble Inn was about as close to getting off the grid as D.C. offers.

  Willie rolled his eyes when I gave him the address and offered to lend me some money.

  “You do know what you’re getting into?” he asked as we were nearing 18th Street. “Trust me, I can find you nicer at the same cost. A better chance of sleeping through the night.”

  Willie waited outside while I checked to see if they would give me a room.

  The Indian desk clerk behind a Plexiglas window had equal doubts about my sophistication, especially when I told him I wanted a room for four nights and offered to pay in advance.

  “Here?”

  A sign just to the left of the clerk’s window laid out the house rules: NO SWEARING, LOUD NOISES, FIGHTING, OR SPITTING. Below that, another handwritten sign spelled out the rates: twenty-three dollars for two hours, forty dollars a night. Overhead, two cameras recorded my arrival at the Amble Inn for posterity.

  “You’re alone?”

  I nodded.

  “You’re not planning on causing any trouble, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” he said, pushing a key through the tray under the Plexiglas window. “Enjoy.”

  I stepped out onto the front stoop and put my forefinger to my ear and my thumb to my mouth to let Willie know I’d be calling.

  Two cans of St. Ide’s malt liquor sat open on top of the window air-conditioning unit. Across the street, a Baskins-Robbins outlet glowed in the night. Next to it, a dozen people trickled out of the International House of Prayer for All People. Their stooped shoulders and frantic smoking suggested an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Just below my own window, a single dim bulb barely illuminated a sign that read AMBLE INN: REAR PARKING. RCA RADIO & TV.

  The TV was a Zenith; the radio wasn’t at all. The carpet, a sinister floral swirl, was pocked with cigarette burns, as was the top and, oddly, the sides of the flimsy dresser. Otherwise, the room wasn’t half bad. The sheets had actually been changed. The bathroom had a fresh towel. The toilet flushed and refilled. For twenty dollars an hour I could watch all the porn flicks my heart desired. The comforts of home.

  I could hear the door opening in the room next to mine, the squeak of bedsprings, a metronomic thumping of the headboard against the same wall my headboard rested against. “Too big,” a woman’s voice kept saying in a relentless monotone. “Too big.”

  CHAPTER 43

  AT TEN THE NEXT MORNING I went out to call the galleries of Theodore Hew-Chatworth. Teddy picked up on the first ring.

  “We’re closed. All day,” he said, hanging up the phone.

  I called back. “Teddy, don’t hang up.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Max. Why are you closed?”

  “It’s none of your business. But since I’ve been dying to make your day, we were robbed.”

  O’Neill was probably right about his phone being tapped.

  A half block to the east of the inn, the convenience store tacked on to a Shell station offered up an almost drinkable pot of coffee and microwavable sausage biscuits. I bought one of each, plus a four-pack of lightbulbs, five cans of jumbo lighter fluid, a combination lock guaranteed to “beat the bad guys every time,” and a large spray can of air freshener. I was almost out the door when I remembered copy paper. A package of it sat all alone on a shelf, under a banner that read COMPUTER SUPPLIES.

  Back in my room, I propped the bathroom window open and left the gas can sitting on the sill so it wouldn’t stink the place up too badly. Then I started calling around to medical-su
pply stores until I found one in Northeast D.C. that sold those little pen-size drills emergency-room docs use to make holes in fingernails after they’ve been slammed with a hammer or in a door. While that was being delivered, I popped down to the Burning Dog next door, nestled among the half dozen people already slouched at the bar, and offered fifty bucks to the first person who could produce for me two live rounds of ammunition.

  No one said anything. No one even looked my way. I wasn’t surprised. Washington, D.C., might be the world’s foremost provider of deadly weapons, but it’s illegal to sell a single round of ammo inside the city limits, especially to a middle-aged cracker who wanders off the street. I left a fifty on the bar and went to the bathroom.

  When I came back, a pair of nine-millimeter rounds were sitting on the bar and the fifty was gone. I did it five more times.

  The medical-supply driver didn’t seem to find it odd at all that a guy living in a whorehouse was ordering a pocket-size drill and paying cash for it, which was just fine with me. I sat by the window in my room, cradling the lightbulbs carefully in a pillowcase, and made a bb-size hole in the top of the glass. Next, I pried open the rounds, tipped the charge out onto a piece of creased paper, and used the crease to pour the gunpowder through the hole I’d just drilled. Then, ever so carefully, I removed the lightbulb over the sink basin in the bathroom, replaced it with my new one, and plugged the sink with its stopper.

  An ice bucket or something similar would have helped with the next step, but since I didn’t have one, I had to settle for the Gideon Bible, spread just enough to stand on end in the bottom of the sink basin. When that was stable, I filled the bottom of the basin with two inches of lighter fluid. Then I took a stack of the blank copy paper, stuffed it in a manila envelope, rested that on top of the dry end of the Bible, and shut the bathroom door behind me.

  When I was ready to leave, I used my new combination lock and the hasp already screwed into the jamb to secure the door behind me. You gotta love a hotel that encourages you to bring your own lock with you.