Robert Baer - Blow the house down

It all made unassailable sense, Frank said, but Jill had other plans. Instead of the cottage, she took the money and bought a condo, and instead of Frank, she filled it with an associate professor of Slavic languages and sent hubby his walking papers. Et voila, Frank was broke again. But America is the land of second acts, and Frank Beckman was its living proof.

First, Frank got his daughter back. India had just turned eleven when he was brought home for good and elevated to the seventh floor, number two

in the Directorate of Operations, which made him, with about ten degrees of separation, my boss. Ten months later, long after midnight, India, a runaway, showed up on Frank's doorstep in Herndon, Virginia, after a week of frantic searching. Her stepfather, by now a full professor and department chair, couldn't keep his hands off her, she told Frank. Instead of immediately killing him-his first and deepest instinct-Frank got Jill to sign away her rights to India and set about learning to be a father.

I could still remember almost every detail of Frank's retirement party five years earlier, a barbecue in the fenced-in backyard of his soulless split-level. India was all of seventeen by then. She'd raced through high school as if it were a track event and had just finished her freshman year at Berkeley, animated in the way that only wildly precocious teenagers can be. Over plates of charred chicken earlier in the evening, India told me that she'd already taken courses from two of the people who taught me best.

"Joy of my life," Frank said, with only a slight slur.

We were sitting on his postage-stamp-size deck, watching her bag up the plastic cups and paper plates that littered the yard. India was dragging a recycle bin behind her for the beer and wine bottles. I'd edged out the last of the guests a half hour earlier-a husband-and-wife analyst team that never knew when to leave. Frank and I were cradling snifters, pretending to admire the bouquet and color in the blue bug-light by the sliding glass doors. A bottle of Remy Martin sat on the table between us.

"Joy O' My Life!" he yelled out, louder this time.

"I know, Dad. I know," she called back with a laugh, "and you're the joy o' mine."

I was starting to feel as if I had intruded on some private ritual-a fly on a priest's neck as he blessed the holy elements.

"And Maxie, too," she shouted a split second later to a roar of laughter.

Beside me, I could see Frank flip open the top of an old Sealtest Dairy milk box, the kind my aunt used to keep on the back porch. He rummaged around and pulled out a dirty towel. I could already smell the gun oil.

"I bought it last year," he told me as he folded the corners down. "Didn't buy it, really. Traded a silver Berber dagger for it. Some brother down in Southeast with a taste for antiques."

It was a nice piece, a Beretta six-millimeter with a professionally made silencer, the preferred weapon of Middle East assassins.

"Why?"

"Why-" Not a question. He tilted the Remy Martin bottle in both our directions, wrapped the gun up again, and laid it back in the Sealtest box.

"Why. Because I still wanted to murder the son of a bitch for what he did to India. I figured, What the hell: I retire, I even the score, I die. Case closed."

"And?"

India was waving to us from the far end of the yard, a pair of garbage bags over her shoulder. She was kicking the recycle bin ahead of herself as she worked.

"I decided to get rich instead."

It took a few years, but damn if he didn't.

A miniature guy airing out his miniature schnauzer on the other side of Belmont took one look at me trudging out of the woods, flipped open a cell phone, hit something on speed dial, and took off running, dragging the little rat dog on its side behind him. He'd called security, I bet. The neighborhood pretty much had its own police force and plenty of other help, too.

Motion-detector lights flicked on one by one as I walked by the sprawling coral-stucco Mediterranean at the corner. Across the street, where Tuttle dead-ends at Belmont, two pairs of eyes followed me from behind the tinted glass of a black Cadillac Escalade-private guards for the Embassy of the Sultanate of Oman. Just beyond the embassy, at the intersection with Massachusetts Avenue, sat the Mosque and Islamic Center, wired to the teeth against infidel invaders. For a guy who set out to make his fortune by providing "consulting services" for the oil-rich, Frank couldn't have calibrated his address much more carefully. He had everything but a Bedouin tent parked in the backyard and camel-shit mulch for his boxwoods.

2501 Tuttle Place took up the half of the block that the stucco Mediterranean didn't. Flagstone steps rose on either side to a double front door capped by a limestone half-moon and, above that, a window surrounded by stone scrollwork. More garlands-in stone and wood-were draped

over and below the windows that flanked the central ones on either side. On top, three dormers rose tastefully punctuated by a pair of ornamental white orbs. Chimneys bound the house at either end. Improbably enough, an ancient, rusting TV antenna was clasped to the easternmost of the chimneys. My guess is that it was a private satellite communications link disguised to look like some piece of fifties claptrap. In Frank's new world, millions of dollars were measurable in nanoseconds.

English ivy crawled up the redbrick facade at both ends and on either side of the door. At the back, behind seven-foot-high brick walls draped with climbing roses, the garden curved its way past a granite pool to the next street over, to an old carriage house that had once served a great tur-reted pile of a mansion built in the 1880s by a Nevada silver king and U.S. Senator. The carriage house was all that remained of the estate. Frank had tarted it up into guest quarters for when his clientele weren't traveling in full retinue.

The only thing that spoiled the perfect symmetry of the place was a wing tacked onto the west side: a bedroom, library, and garage stacked one above the other. The garage dated from an era before automobiles took on the general proportion of boats. Frank's beautifully restored Mercedes 600 had no chance of fitting in there. The fact that it wasn't waiting on the street out front meant either that he'd sent his driver home for the night or that he still wasn't in himself.

I checked my watch: 11:07. A little red light was winking at me from inside the old coal chute that once would have served Frank's basement furnace. I was on camera already, and I hadn't even made it to the front door. A block and a half up the street, a car crept slowly down my way, spotlights shining on either side as it searched even the underside of parked cars for the likes of me, perhaps for me in particular. I stepped up to Frank's door, pulled off my black watch cap, straightened my hair as best I could, and pushed the bell.

Chimes tinkled somewhere at the back of the house. Steps approached but then stopped just short of the door. A closed-circuit camera whirred above my head-swiveled left, swiveled right, panned the street behind me, the sidewalks, then zeroed in for a good eye-to-eye.

"It's me, Simon," I said, waving my hand back and forth in front of the lens. "Waller. In the flesh." I must have looked as if I'd climbed out of a

peat bog.

Simon, Beckman's butler, opened the door a crack but kept it chained and his shoulder hard against it, just in case.

"Mr. Beckman is out," Simon finally said, after he had ignored me in every meaningful way he could. "I will happily inform him that you passed by, Mr. Waller. Have a good evening."

I stuck my foot in the door before he could close it, but at best, we'd reached a standoff. Simon was too civilized, for the moment, to crush my