Robert Baer - Blow the house down

"Hear… me… well… Waller. When you walked in this room, you had everyone's sympathy. Now it's gone. And don't count on getting any from the Bureau, either. The mood they're in, they're going to ram a proctoscope up your ass and bolt it in place. I'm through here." She picked up her stack of traffic and walked out.

I still had no idea what shit storm I'd wandered into, but now at least I knew the FBI had been called in, which meant that I was the subject not just of a public humiliation but also of a criminal investigation. I'd worked enough with the Bureau to know they weren't going to buy a flimsy case like this. Cabrillo and the narco charges were for internal consumption, a way to get me out of the building while they investigated me for something else. But what?

We all sat there saying nothing until Webber unfolded himself from the far end of the table, waved his slender pimp hand in a little dismissive circle, and started down my way.

'Let me have a minute with Max," he said in a whisper, taking me by the elbow out into the hall.

Webber's breath smelled of cardamom and some other herb I couldn't entify. Maybe he was using organic toothpaste these days. I wondered wnat would happen if I ripped his tongue out of his mouth.

vince, tell me what just went on in there," I said, forcing a laugh, where there's smoke, there's bound to be mirrors."

He didn't even smile. You already know," he said. "Your name was bound to come across s°meone's screen eventually."

The Rick Ames Doctrine again.

"I know you're not on anyone's payroll," he continued, even though he must have seen I'd lost interest. "And if the same lead had come across my desk five years ago, I would have dismissed it right away. I can't today. After Ames, Congress is calling the shots. But listen, Max, the Bureau is going to come to the same conclusions. You know that. They're gonna lose interest, drop the case. I'm going to ride this one, make sure it happens as fast as possible. Just don't go stepping on any more toes, especially Mary Beth's."

Did Webber really think he was going to sweet-talk me out the front door, make me go away and die without a fight?

Webber suddenly pulled his head back with his shark's grin and nudged me in the ribs.

"Hey, Maggie sounds like a spurned woman. Anything you want to tell me?"

"How do I get in touch with you?" I asked, ignoring him. "Give me your cell number."

Webber looked at me for a beat, no doubt wondering what I was up to.

"You know, for an update. Sudden revelations. No crank calls. Promise."

Webber paused for another beat and then pulled out a yellow sticky pad, wrote down a number, and handed it to me.

"No one has it," he assured me. "Call me in two weeks and I'm sure I'll have something for you."

"Do you ever wonder what happened to them, Vince?" I asked as I stuffed the paper in my wallet.

"Them?"

"The compromised networks in Iran."

"Dead, I suppose." He sounded as he if were talking about fish bait. "It's a nasty business, Max."

"But we don't have to make it so easy for them."

The shark's grin never left Webber's face as he crooked his manicured finger and summoned the faux-Armanis from down the hall to come collect me.

It was only then, as I walked away, that I realized I had been wrong about the matrices. I was being framed, plain and simple. No one was connecting dots; they were spitting them out like rivets to make a case against me. That's what the circus in New York had been about: goad me, see where I ran, work it all into the story line. Smart as hell, really.

THE POLYGRAPH WAS THE PAS DE D EUX I knew it would be, with me doing the heavy lifting. Assured I was guilty as charged, the operator tweaked his settings accordingly. Just as I had been trained by some of our same in-house necromancers, I declined to react to any of the dozen or so questions posed, and so the stylus did nothing, a flat line. (Strangely, or perhaps not, my Beirut spiral notebooks never came up. What better time to raise the subject than when I was wired to a chair?) By any objective standard, our session finished in a draw, but Langley follows low-rent Vegas rules: In the event of a toss-up, house wins. In my now-fat security file, the results would be entered as "inconclusive." Unofficially, "inconclusive" nicely cemented my new pariah status.

Afterward, the Armani twins sped me out in an unmarked Jeep Cherokee to my little off-campus office park near Tysons Corner. The door to my office was yellow-taped: Do not cross. Crime scene. No one was inside, but I could see from the mess that they'd left nothing untouched. The safe

drawers were pulled open, the files stacked on the floor, next to three reinforced cardboard moving boxes, all ready to be carted off somewhere: forensics, counterintelligence, the seventh floor. Maybe to the Washington Post for all I knew.

The Armanis were doing wing duty for me: one by either arm. I could see them taking my measure, probably wishing they could handcuff me. Behind them, the twenty or so annuitants who worked under me had formed two lines, a cordon for my perp walk. Their cardigans and pipe-stained teeth, eerily dated bouffants and comfortable footwear gave the scene an almost comic element, as if Mr. Rogers had been a spy all along. I'd spent a year shepherding this herd of broken pensioners, making sure their contracts got renewed so they could pay for their prescription medicines. Now not one of them would make eye contact with me.

"We will need you to inventory your personal effects," the Armani on my right said. He seemed to be reading off some mental index card he'd memorized in Security 101.

I sifted silently through the boxes: a hash pipe from Yemen, the Baluch prayer rug I'd been dragging around the world ever since my sainted mother had left me there, all the other cheap souvenirs you pick up overseas and put around your office to create the illusion that your Washington servitude is only temporary. At the bottom was a framed photo of my daughter, mugging it up with an Auguste Rodin sculpture in the garden at the Hirshhorn. I'd taken it during her two-week visit the summer before, the best time together I think we'd ever had. Rikki was a teenager now, funny, ironic like her mother. I had no idea what had happened to the sullen little girl with braces all over her teeth, but she was gone, magically replaced. At night-Rikki in my bed, I on the sofa-we'd chatter like schoolgirls before falling asleep. I'd never done that with anyone. It was like a half-month-long pajama party.

"It's not all here," I said, getting back to my feet. "I had a couple things in my safe. Mind if I look?"

They whispered to each other, seemed about to call for permission, then must have figured, Oh, what the hell.

"Okay," one of them said, "but make it quick."

I went right to the bottom drawer, at the back, where I'd kept the spiral notebooks and my files on Buckley and Mousavi. Gone. Everything else was there except them. Webber was probably looking at them at that very minute, searching for the phantom connection to the phantom narcotics network.

"I must have made a mistake," I said as I stood up.

The other Armani had produced a clipboard from somewhere, a form for me to sign, acknowledging that I had done whatever I had just done. The pen was chained to the board, I suppose so I wouldn't be tempted to steal it as my last criminal act inside the place.

The final station of the cross was waiting back at headquarters. I had to be "read out" of the clearances I'd been "read into" over the years- Special Compartmented Intelligence, a nuclear Q Clearance, Talent-Keyhole, one or two others. I'd even forgotten I still had a Q Clearance, but never mind. The industrial-strength matron in charge of last rites dutifully ran through the criminal penalties for talking about this stuff to the unwashed, but I didn't need to hear it. Everyone knew that if you crossed any of the bright red lines laid out in the 1947 National Security Act, you'd win yourself a one-way ticket to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, all expenses paid, and spend the rest of your life on a concrete bed in a 7'l"-by-12'l" cell.