Robert Baer - Blow the house down

I was standing by myself, toeing the crushed gas tank, wishing I had at least thrown on foul-weather gear, and thinking that even Superman didn't mess with Kryptonite, when I felt more than saw someone coming down the sidewalk, walking fast, straight at me. White, black, Hispanic? I couldn't tell. It was too dark to see anything other than that he was wearing a forest-green poncho, hood up, and a pair of basketball shoes the size of canoes. His arms were under the poncho-with or without a weapon, I had no way to know, but I hadn't stayed alive by assuming the best about human nature. I was just about to take a step sideways and kick in his right knee when whoever it was took a sharp right turn and set off across the street.

"Silly, paranoid fool," he said as he passed me, in a voice as void of accent as any human voice could be.

Was he talking to himself? Nuts? Talking to me? I watched him turn left on the other side of the street and head west practically at a run, before he suddenly darted into an alley and disappeared. It was at that last moment, just over his shoulder, that I saw the RV idling three blocks down Columbia, double parked, blocking a lane. The brake lights were on but nothing else. The curtain in the rear window was parted. It was too dark to see if anyone was looking out.

Back in the apartment, it took me a few minutes to find my Majestic lock-picking kit-for some idiotic reason, I'd hidden it inside the toaster-and a few minutes more to get through the lock on the utilities' door. The chirpy gay menage a trois in 4C had gone out of their way the previous morning to tell me that they would be sunning themselves in user-friendly Laguna Beach while I sweated through D.C.'s summer. The least they could do, I thought, was loan me their phone line. I used a pair of alligator clips to tie into the interface terminal, then rang up Willie.

"Hey, what are you up to?" I asked, pretending to be surprised he was asleep.

"Shootin' hoops. What else a nigga be doin' at two in the morning in the pourin' rain?"

"It's only nine-thirty. Willie, I got a little problem."

"Everyone's got problems, Maxwell. You heard of original sin? 'In Adam's fall sinned we all.'"

"I'm serious."

"So am I. Can't it wait until morning? I'm up at five."

"Remember where you drop me?"

"I'm not senile yet, my friend. You mean-"

I cut him off. Stolen line or not, the phone is your worst enemy. "Yeah. I'll be there. Pick me up in fifteen."

I'd known Willie for twenty years. We'd first met through Stash, an old Air America pilot who'd lost a leg and a foot in Laos. Two appendages shy of a driver's license, Stash hired Willie and his taxi to get back and forth to his make-work job in Seven Corners. I rotated back to the field shortly before budget cuts forced Langley to retire Stash and send him home to die, but I made it a point to call Willie whenever I was in Washington and needed a ride your average cabbie couldn't give you. Willie looked like a mortician's assistant, but he had the heart of a NASCAR driver and the soul of a wolverine.

Stash and I had never told Willie where we worked, but he'd figured it out listening in on our war stories about shit holes like Laos and the Congo. Willie didn't say anything, just shook his head, probably thinking what fools white people are, but when his son had spent half his senior year in high school trying to decide between going to Georgetown to study international relations-a straight shot at the State Department-or heading north to Cornell to become an engineer, Willie talked him into Cornell. He knew a dead-end road when he saw one, and he'd had his own turn with international relations, serving Uncle Sam on the Batangan Peninsula with the 11th Infantry Brigade just about the time William Calley Jr. and his platoon were slaughtering peasants wholesale.

I went back upstairs to my apartment, put on a Levi's jacket, and stuffed a black watch cap in the pocket-the only thing I could find in a hurry to keep the rain off me. Then I grabbed a sterile cell phone I'd stowed under the socks in my top dresser drawer and jotted down its number on a scrap of paper. I used the land line to call Geico and report the accident, hoping I would be put on hold the way I always was when I had something important to discuss. I wasn't disappointed. A digital voice said it would be a twelve-minute wait. As I lay the phone on the floor, I crossed my fingers

and hoped she was right. Twelve minutes was just about what it would take for Willie to throw a slicker over his pj's, fire up the Crown Vic, and make it the half dozen blocks to Ontario Liquors.

I took the stairs to the basement and slid past the resident barrio. Uni-vision was cranked up to high volume: a soccer game, Nicaragua against somebody, a tie, injury time. I could have kicked down the back door instead of using the knob and no one would have heard. In the alley, I all but knocked over the El Salvadoran kid. He was peeing against the Dumpster, eyes wide as a raccoon, stoned out of his mind.

I wandered down the alley, lingered by a Dumpster or two myself, and startled enough rats to stock a leper colony. The only way to see me was through a pair of night-vision binoculars, a league I wasn't prepared to play in. Normally, the stoops would have been packed all the way along Euclid and back up Ontario, but the rain had driven the street life inside. Willie was just pulling up as I turned back onto Columbia. He had the car in gear before I closed the door.

"Straight to St. E's or should we give them a run?" he said. St. E's is St. Elizabeths, the local loony bin, home to Ezra Pound and John Hinckley Jr., among other famous nuts.

"Rock Creek," I told him, staring out the back window. "Take Memorial Bridge to the GW Parkway." I was checking to see if anyone had pulled out behind us when Willie tossed a box of Kleenex into the back and flipped down the mirror on the passenger's side. A cobweb covered the entire left side of my face. My ear had disappeared. I never wanted to meet the spider that made it.

I guided Willie along a countersurveillance route in northern Virginia I'd run at least fifty times: a loop-de-loop at the 1-395 exchange, a quick on-and-off at the Key Bridge / Rosslyn exit, a U-turn just after Spout Run, enough traps so that a tail either had to show itself or lose you. It was as subtle as a quadruple bypass, but subtlety wasn't the point. The Norton was proof enough that all wasn't well in my little world. No reason to pretend I was out for an evening drive. The only thing I cared about right now Was a couple hours of privacy with a person who didn't even know I would be meeting him.

Basically, I was flying blind in the backseat. I needed the rearview and side mirrors to check everything out, but Willie had those. Just to complicate things, there was way too much traffic. Didn't anyone sleep anymore? Worse, the rain was starting to sound like a Bombay monsoon, a steady drumbeat on Willie's vinyl roof.

It crossed my mind to tell Willie what was going on, why I'd gotten him out of bed to give me a ride. If there was anyone I could trust outside the Agency, it was Willie. But how could I ever explain the whole insane run in New York, the alligator clips and the stolen phone line, the call to Geico to convince anyone listening to my phone I was still in my apartment, now this? Spending a life doing anything and everything you can to protect your agents puts you inside a rare subset of existence. It all made sense to me. But Willie wasn't there. Wise as he was, he'd never get it. Espionage is like the world at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. When a creature from it suddenly gets dragged to the surface, no one knows what to make of the thing.

"Phone me in two but not on my land line. On this one." I dropped the number of the ghost cell phone on the front seat.