Robert Baer - Blow the house down

"Or are you just stopping by on your way home from a wet T-shirt contest?" India's tone had a definite edge, but her smile was as friendly as ever.

"You think I'm too old to compete?"

"Oh, Max, no. Never."

I took her hands and gave her a quick peck on the cheek.

"I thought you were still in Paris."

She looked at me, held my hands a beat longer, then pulled me in for a hug. India's through with being a girl, I thought. Maybe she never really was one. Some people never get the luxury of a youth. I knew something about that.

"Vacation's over," she finally said. "Time to make a living. Just like the old man."

"Looks like he's struggling."

The frieze was just over her shoulder.

Before she could say anything else, Frank was back, wearing corduroys and a cashmere sweater. The air-conditioning was set at Arctic levels. Simon was two steps behind with a pair of straight-up Scotches, no ice. I could see India wondering where her glass was, but her father gave her his own peck on the check and gently pushed her out the door.

"Good night, dear. I'm sure Max is just stopping by for a minute. You've got work tomorrow."

The library was set off from the rest of the house by a set of paneled pocket doors. I waited until Frank had pulled them shut before I spoke.

"Work?"

"She started last week at the Agency. Can you believe it? Doing traces on the Saudi desk, a whole lifetime ahead of her to ascend to the seventh floor. It wasn't my idea, I assure you. I tried to dissuade her."

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. It seemed a million years since he had unwrapped the Beretta on his Home Depot deck.

"You might have told me. I could have-"

Frank raised his hand to stop me.

"The stink was on you, Max my boy, the royal whiff. Everyone knew it. My daughter didn't need that."

"You might have told me that, too."

Frank laughed. "You need to hang around the water cooler more. That's where everything happens in an inert bureaucracy."

I was sitting back on my towel; Frank, in a matching end chair beside me. He reached in a drawer of the low table in front of us, pulled out a remote, and punched a button. A sheet of the chestnut paneling slid noiselessly back to reveal a huge flat-screen TV.

"There's supposed to be a program on Al Jazeera tonight about Yemen. The place is circling the drain again, or so thinks Hunt Oil."

Frank surfed up and down the channels looking for it; gave up and flipped through Fox, MSNBC, CNN; then turned the TV off. He sipped his Scotch, frowned, and pushed a button on a side table. Simon must have been waiting on the other side of the library doors.

"It's too late for this. Bring us two Armagnacs."

"I thought you might show up here sooner rather than later," he said when Simon was gone. "Just not so soon."

Actually, I wasn't surprised Frank had heard about the investigation. Washington is a company town; news of government scandals travels fast. It travels even faster in Agency circles where it's such a welcome diversion from the humdrum truth of collective incompetence.

Frank was right: The Armagnac was a much better choice, and Simon left the decanter. I gave Frank the Reader's Digest version of Webber's show trial and the FBI investigation. When I got to the part about the spiral notebooks being gone, he stopped me.

"What did you keep those for?"

"Wandering fires."

"Knock off the riddles."

"We never found out who kidnapped and killed Bill Buckley. It's been sort of my grail. You know that. You're not curious?"

"No. If I'd stopped to solve every mystery there was, I'd still be in Kentucky."

"It must have had something to do with the first day I walked in the place and saw those words chiseled in the marble: 'Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.'"

Frank scowled as I said it: Stirring mottoes weren't his thing, either. I was on to the Norton, the RV, and the guy in the poncho when he stopped me again. "Are you telling me someone's out to get you? A conspiracy?"

"Frank, c'mon, no one blow-torches a Kryptonite lock just to push the bike into traffic."

"Maybe you didn't close the lock tight this time. Maybe that kid you pay to watch the bike watched the combination instead. That's what you get when you live among the savages."

I didn't forget to close the lock, and I didn't live with savages. If Frank would ever walk the ten blocks to Adams Morgan and have a look around, he would know that. But he wouldn't, and I wasn't going to get into any of that with him.

"How about the RV?" I said instead. "Or the poncho guy calling me paranoid? It doesn't-"

"Your famous score-keeping."

"Someone's got to."

"I hate to tell you this, old pal, but Smirch and the Black Hand went the way of the Soviet Union, and I don't really think the Trilateral Commission or the Masons care enough about you to steal your moped."

"Norton-it was a goddamn Norton Commando! Vintage."

"A thousand apologies. Your Norton. Your Commando. Your vintage. Mea culpa."

"I need to know why Webber and this guy Scott or whatever the hell his real name is are after me, Frank. The truth."

"Max, the truth never set a table or put a roof over anyone's head." Something chirped in the room. An ice-blue light flashed on the phone on the desk. Frank was out of his chair in a flash. He didn't turn on the receiver until he was safely on the other side of the library doors.

"Your highness," he said again. I had no way of knowing if it was the same one. He was talking softer this time, running off a string of numbers from a sheet he'd snatched off the desk along with the phone. None of it meant a thing to me.

While I waited for Frank to return, I studied the photos hanging on the wall behind his desk: Frank with George W Bush, taken at what looked to be the Breakers in Palm Beach. Bush had his arm around Frank's shoulder. Karl Rove and Jeb Bush were standing off to the side, talking. The White House had changed hands only six months earlier, but a photo of Frank with Bill Clinton and Al Gore that used to fill this spot was already gone, banished with the Florida vote and three-day-old fish. Next to the Bush photo was one of Frank with Saudi King Fahd at the Yamama palace. Fahd had his hand out, backside up, beckoning Frank to kiss it. Below that, Frank was cradling a hunting rifle next to Vladimir Putin, probably somewhere on the Russian steppe. Frank had been in Berlin when Putin was a young KGB officer there. They'd met a couple times at cocktail parties, had dinner once together that I knew of. Clearly, Frank had rewarmed their acquaintance. There were plenty of others: Frank and Musharraf, Frank and Tenet, Frank and on and on.

I'd seen variations of the same brag wall in dozens upon dozens of

Washington offices: ex-secretaries of state; ex-directors of this and that, including the CIA that I was so recently ex- of. The Carlyle Group offices on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest were wall to wall with them. Frank's was no different. He'd been chief of station in a half dozen high-profile haunts in the twelve years between Brazzaville and his summons home to the seventh floor, most of them along the crescent of oil that runs from Central Asia down to Iran and back along the Arab side of the Gulf. He knew the people who counted: presidents, intel chiefs, the royals; their corrupt offspring, too, the grease that keeps the wheels turning. Their home numbers were in his Rolodex. All the walls said the same thing: / know the people you need to know, I can tie up the deal or fuck it. Don't even think about ignoring me.

I tried to imagine my own brag wall: terrorists, con artists, pimps, assassins, pedophiles. Don't ignore me, to be sure, but not exactly the kind of people to cash out on.

Frank walked back into the library, finished his Armagnac in a quick sip, put his glass down on the desk, and took mine-not quite finished- and set it down beside his.