Blow the House Down

by Robert Baer

  “Let me tell you how it happened from the beginning.”

  In late 2000, Frank was in Islamabad bidding on a natural gas pipeline when he ran into an old informant who’d fought in the Afghan war. After dinner, the informant pulled out a box of old photos. They were pretty much all the same, mostly mouj posing with AK-47’s, except the one: Oliver Wendell Channing posing with Osama bin Laden and three others.

  “Christ, we all knew Oliver was a loose canon,” Frank said. “Worse than you. He never reported nine-tenths of the people he met. He spent his vacations in the back of beyond, in places we weren’t supposed to go to. By the end he was completely out of control. I wasn’t all that surprised to see him in a picture with bin Laden.”

  A week after Frank got back from Islamabad, he ran into Millis at a dinner on the Hill. The two hadn’t seen much of each other in years, but they had Peshawar in common, so Frank told Millis about the photo. When he was through, Millis spun Frank around and pushed him out of earshot of everyone. The National Security Agency, Millis said, had just intercepted a call from David Channing, Oliver’s son, to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who by then had an arrest warrant on him. There wasn’t anything substantive in the intercept, but it was clear David Channing hadn’t called a wrong number.

  Curious, Millis went out to Langley to ask about David Channing. No one wanted to touch it. David Channing was too big a political player in Washington to go after lightly. Also, it was an election year, and Channing was showering money on the neocons. If they got the White House, whoever had crossed Channing was sure to pay. The seventh floor had no intention of sticking its nose in that manure heap.

  Millis was savvy enough to know he couldn’t go after Channing based on one call to KSM. He was about to let it drop, write it off as a coincidence, but then one afternoon a CIA analyst knocked on his door with a story to tell. In 1996, after the Manila police rolled up KSM’s networks, the analyst did a profile on options purchased around the time the planes were supposed to go down. It was just a hunch, but he came across a cluster of trades going short on the airline stocks, betting their stock would fall. The analyst couldn’t decide whether it was one person buying the puts or it was all just a coincidence. They’d been made through dozens of traders, enciphered accounts, layered transactions, and complicated swaps. He enlisted the National Security Agency to see if they could reconstruct the calls to and from the traders, intersecting them with the purchases of puts. It wasn’t easy. The buy orders came in on different phones, from all around the world, but there was one thing that got his attention: a phone number in Bar Harbor, Maine.

  Right after KSM’s accomplices were arrested in Manila, someone calling from the Maine number contacted a trader, who immediately canceled some airline put options. The analyst reverse-traced the number to BT Trading, and followed BT Trading to David Channing. That’s as far as he’d gotten. He knew he’d walked into a mine field. Without backup, he wasn’t going to go any further. When he heard about Millis’s nosing around headquarters asking questions about Channing, he decided on his own to go see Millis.

  “Why didn’t Millis and the analyst take it to the FBI?” I asked.

  “You’d have to see the stuff,” Frank said. “It was too dense and complicated to open a criminal case. Instead, Millis decided to enlist me. I was on the outside. I didn’t have to file reports. I traveled in that world, options trading.”

  Frank dug around and found out that Michelle Zwanzig was Channing’s Swiss fiduciary. To get a foot in her door, Frank opened an account with her. Not that it did any good. She never talked about Channing’s business. The only thing Frank was able to do was get the layout of her office and a look at the outside of her safe.

  “So that’s where the key thing came in,” I said. “The McGuffin to encourage me to break into Michelle’s office and make sure I invited India to Geneva.”

  Frank smiled.

  I wondered for a moment if Frank had been listening on another line when India and I had talked. If so, he must have worked hard to keep from laughing, but Frank was already back on Channing.

  He said he’d thought about presenting the evidence to the seventh floor himself, but he would have gotten the same reception Millis got: blind fear of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue once the election was settled. Neocons are nothing if not vindictive.

  “Besides, the evidence was still too flimsy, and there’s no way an inside investigation could have been hidden from Webber,” Frank said.

  “You knew about Webber that long ago?”

  “Everybody knew he was angling for a job with Channing. That’s the only reason Applied Science got a contract with the Agency.”

  “I knew it,” I interrupted again. “It was Webber who shit-canned the stuff from Kuwait, the SIM chips and the interrogation of the two Saudis they arrested. ‘Not credible.’ I can see him brushing it off his desk with a flip of his hand.”

  “You’re wrong about one thing, though,” Frank said, stopping me. “Webber doesn’t know about Channing and KSM’s plans. He’s really just the cleanup crew. Once Millis and I decided that the seventh floor wasn’t going to act, we read three people into this. Maggie was one of them; the other two you won’t ever need to know. We knew the investigation had to be done from the outside—you.”

  It only now occurred to me that I’d been outsourced, put on the same level as Applied Science and the thousands of Agency retirees working on the Dulles Corridor. Only I was never given the choice.

  Frank must have seen my look. “Max, what would you have done?”

  “You had no idea I’d pick up the thread, find my way to Nabil and the prince. Without them I would never have ID’ed Oliver Channing in the picture.”

  He answered me with a question: “After O’Neill told you the photo was found in Millis’s motel room, would you have acted otherwise?”

  “But it wasn’t found there, was it?”

  “No, we got someone in the FBI to pass on the lie to O’Neill.”

  “How did Millis die? I can’t believe he was murdered.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t. But the stuff about his brains not being where they were supposed to be—more bullshit we fed O’Neill.”

  “You set up O’Neill, too?”

  “I knew you’d run to O’Neill after you were shoved out the door. We needed him to tell you about the surveillance and make you believe Millis had his brains sucked out. You trust O’Neill.”

  “I need to know: Was it you who arranged to have O’Neill’s briefcase stolen, forcing him out?”

  “I don’t know anything about the briefcase. What I do know is that Channing is behind the current investigation into O’Neill. He found out about your meeting O’Neill the day you left for France. Channing needs him discredited.”

  “Back to how Millis died.”

  “We don’t know, and we probably never will know,” Frank said.

  “Of all the case officers you could have picked, why me?”

  “Your obsession with Buckley and Mousavi. Your obsessions are what drive you.”

  “Oh, come on, Frank. You couldn’t be sure of that. I could have just picked up and disappeared. It was a crazy gamble, thinking I’d pick up all the clues you left and follow them.”

  “I know about Baluchistan. Betrayal and abandonment. It’s something you can never let go of. After you got to Europe, I made you believe I’d betrayed you. Not answering your phone calls was the start. As the clues of my betrayal mounted, I knew you would come after me but in the end find Channing. I was the bait.”

  “Webber’s visit to you with Lawson—it never happened, did it?”

  Frank shook his head no.

  “India was in on it from the beginning. She never went to work for Webber, did she?”

  “Another piece of disinformation we slipped to O’Neill. Like I said, you work best when things get personal.”

  “But using India as bait? That was cynical.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen,” Frank shot
back. “I blame myself for that. If it’s any consolation, I was madder at myself than you when I burst into your room at the Beau Rivage.”

  I thought about how Frank must have run her into me on the Syrian-Lebanese border and in Geneva, feeding her a script.

  “You offered her up on a platter,” I said, more to myself than to Frank. I hoped my life never came to the point that I ever sacrificed Rikki like that.

  “Where’s Rikki these days? Mind the glass houses, Max.”

  “And India carried it off beautifully, right to the end,” I said, ignoring him. “She even tipped off Applied Science where I was staying.”

  “That wasn’t her. Maybe not even Applied Science.”

  “Who, then?”

  “We don’t know. Someone. It doesn’t matter. They want the documents.”

  “Who else besides Channing is in on this?”

  “We don’t know that, either. David Channing definitely has a following in the White House. I have no idea who knows what.”

  “They want to invade the Middle East, don’t they?”

  “They’re only missing a pretext. Channing’s well enough plugged in to know that if bin Laden and KSM run some planes, let’s say, into Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities, this president seizes them. But the point for Channing is that oil goes through the ceiling, and he makes a killing.”

  “What about Iran’s role?”

  “Another unknown.”

  “Is Mousavi dead?”

  “There are two choices: Mousavi is alive and working with KSM. Or Mousavi is dead and someone picked up the torch for him. Let it go.”

  “One more question: Mousavi—did Oliver Channing recruit him?”

  “Yes and no. We think he cultivated Mousavi when he was a student in Beirut. He helped Mousavi get a visa to UCLA.”

  “Why’s there no record of a visa?”

  “There was. David Channing just saw that it got scrubbed clean, or almost all of it.”

  “Oliver didn’t have anything to do with Buckley’s—”

  “Unlikely. The guy was a harmless romantic.”

  I was about to ask if Frank thought David Channing had ever met Mousavi, but Frank was right. This wasn’t about history.

  “Where’s India now?”

  “She’s gone off with a friend. The young. Late-night rambles.”

  “A friend?”

  He left it at that.

  “So what’s the next move?” I asked.

  “The ball’s in your court, my friend. Let’s hope you don’t hit it back into the net.”

  “If you’d told me…”

  “I’ll take the blame for that. Just go get the paper and come back with it.”

  He stood up with me, threw an arm over my shoulder, and led me up the terrace steps and through the house. Half an hour earlier, I had been certain I was going to die at his poolside.

  “I’ll make sure you get Maggie’s hearing tomorrow—a real one. No setup. No Sherley. No Webber.”

  CHAPTER 51

  THE WAITING ROOM FOR THE CHINATOWN EXPRESS (or Dragon Coach or Today Bus—it goes by many names) sits in the basement of a modest two-story townhouse, two doors down from the 6th and I Streets Synagogue and across the street from the redbrick Fujian Residents’ Association and the barely standing Teddy’s House of Comedy Restaurant and Tavern. This is Washington at its most eclectic.

  A television was playing low by the door: some grainy black-and-white movie that looked as if it ought to be starring Ray Milland. One of those church-social-size coffee urns steamed and sputtered on a Formica-topped table. The half dozen chairs were taken up by a motley collection of students, wizened Chinese-American ancients, and a pair of hard-looking women. I thought I recognized one of them from Rhode Island Avenue. Maybe the smoke had driven her to high ground.

  The rest of us stood against the walls, trying not to think about what we were doing waiting for a bus at three-fifteen in the morning. The price was right, though: twenty dollars one way to Manhattan, thirty dollars round-trip. If the traffic cooperated, the trip took only an hour longer than by rail. It was the safest way I could get up to see O’Neill to get a copy of the documents without leaving a trace. Unlike the shuttle or the Metroliner, there was no chance I’d have to show an ID. And the buses ran all night long.

  I was surprised when I stepped out on the street to see more people waiting: what looked like a rock band complete with drum set, a pair of mothers each with sprawls of children, two guys who might have been pimps for the two women inside. Our Chinatown-to-Chinatown express was going to be standing room only if we picked up many more passengers in Baltimore and Philadelphia.

  Just at the edge of the crowd, leaning against the side of the stoop of the building next door, was a dark pile of some sort—clothing or people. I walked over and bent down for a look. An old woman was leaning against the steps, asleep, her face half covered by a worn black shawl. The rest of her seemed to disappear into its folds. In the woman’s lap, cradled in her arms, also wrapped in black, was a little girl: four, five, six years old; I’ve never been able to tell.

  I’d seen this tableau a thousand times, from Khartoum to Kabul—grandmother and granddaughter, destiny’s orphans—and my response was always the same. I looked for bulges, barrels under the shawl, wires, anything out of the usual, anything to suggest that what I was seeing was what I was supposed to see, not what really was. That’s how you stay alive in my world. Then the rock band shifted its drum set so that the streetlight fell on my human pile, and I felt as if I were seeing some kind of tableau of my own life.

  I had no way of knowing. She could have been Afghan or Iranian. There were too many ruts in her face to say anything for sure, but in that instant when the street lamp first hit her, I was willing to bet the grandmother I was staring at was Baluch. She had the nose, the eyes, the forehead of my friend’s mother who had taken me in when my own mother set across the desert for a life without me. She might even have been my stepmother if I hadn’t known for certain that she had been dead twenty years, but yes, I did make that leap, just for a second, beyond time, beyond this overwhelming doubt, beyond the suspicion beaten into me by every experience I could think of, to some innocent land where miracles do happen.

  Then the grandmother shifted slightly in her sleep and the little girl opened her eyes with that stunned amazement kids have when they’re pulled from dreams, and I truly was floored. It was Rikki, a look I loved from that brief moment when she had been that age and Marissa and I really were a family. Christ, I wanted to see Rikki so badly, the one true thing I knew anymore. Maybe next week. Or the week after.

  I was thinking that maybe I had found that miracle land after all; thinking that I would sit with these two on the way to New York, that we could talk, swap life stories; that for once I might really tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and that maybe the old woman would tell me a truth in return—tell me how we had all come to live in a world as fucked up as this one, tell me how I had fallen into a life that piled betrayal on betrayal on betrayal—when I heard a rumbling and a rush of air behind me and turned around to find the bus, door open, ready for us to board. The Chinatown express was a luxury liner.

  “Grandma,” I said in Baluch, hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently. “It’s here. Time to get on board. I’ll help you.”

  “No,” she answered, unsurprised to find someone speaking her tongue in Washington, D.C. “No. We’re waiting.”

  The little girl’s eyes were open wide now, too. Waiting for what?

  CHAPTER 52

  IF ANYTHING CAN GO WRONG, it will. Murphy’s Law. It’s the first thing they teach you at the Farm, maybe the one eternal truth down there. Fifteen miles south of Wilmington, Delaware, a fuel tanker a few hundred yards in front of us swerved to avoid a pair of deer that must have been standing stock-still in its lane, jackknifed, caught a van broadside traveling two lanes over, and exploded into flames. We got a front-row seat to the aftermath from be
hind a barricade of Delaware state-police cars.

  The two deer on the right seemed to have been dismembered. On the far left, someone—man or woman, it was impossible to tell—had somehow survived. He or she or God knows what was collapsed in the arms of an EMT. In between were the twisted hulk of the van and the still-burning fuel tanker.

  I sat there thinking of the fragility of it all—of the tanker driver, of whoever might be ashes in the embers of the van, of the one thing I knew I couldn’t stand to lose myself: my daughter, Rikki. Maybe it had taken me this whole winding route to understand that. Now I did.

  By the time a Medivac helicopter had lifted off with the sole survivor and tow trucks had cleared the highway, our four-hour trip had turned into a five-hour one. At 8:15 when I was supposed to be meeting O’Neill, we were still working our way crosstown from the Holland Tunnel. When the doors finally opened at 88 East Broadway, it was 8:32. I took off running. O’Neill said he’d light the fire at 9 A.M. I knew he meant it.

  I was in full stride thirteen minutes later, dead in the center of Foley Square, when a shadow descended like some Biblical judgment, followed by the roar of engines.

  What in the name of hell, I remember thinking, is an American Airlines passenger jet doing a few hundred feet over Lower Manhattan? I heard the explosion and looked up. The first thing I noticed were the flames shooting out of the North Tower: a bright ocher. That’s not the color of burning jet fuel. And that’s when I knew: I was too late.

  I turned and raced north for blocks looking for a taxi. Traffic was at a standstill. I stopped at a phone booth. The line was busy. I moved to the next one. Broken. Another block north some woman was just hanging up a pay phone as I ran by. I grabbed it, punched in a call-card number, and dialed England. I was waiting for a rock anthem to finish so I could leave a message when the second plane hit.

  “Rikki!” I shouted into the receiver. “Rikki! I promise. I’ll be there. I’ll be there.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE