Robert Baer - Blow the house down

"Too many digits," I told him. "Look again."

"Your new extended-extended zip code?"

"How about an unreported foreign account-"

"You lying sack-"

"-in St. Kitts."

"-of shit."

He turned the scrap over and read the name on the back.

"Belongs on paper to a nominee-controlled company in Panama. But it's Jamal's. Get the Panamanians to haul in the nominee, and you got him cold. He's been squirreling money there for years, where Uncle Sam can't tax it. Even a rich sister can't get him out of this one."

Silence.

"We pulled it out of the air."

I knew that would get his attention. O'Neill had zero confidence in the Agency's ability to penetrate American black Muslim groups or for that matter any Muslim group anywhere, but he did know we picked up some enlightening "chatter" from time to time, little bytes like nominee-controlled accounts that we rarely showed to the Bureau.

"How long have you had it?"

"Couple months."

"Why now?"

"I love you. I want to have your child."

"Why-"

The space around us was shrinking by the second, the freshmen mixer creeping in like some unstoppable mold. The fat girl from Muhlenberg College had been replaced by a scrawny, ferret-faced kid in a filthy Hofstra T-shirt who was eating two Slim Jims at the same time.

"Outside," O'Neill said, stuffing the piece of paper I'd given him into Bis shirt pocket. "Follow me." In his thin black silk socks and soft Italian loafers, he looked more like a Mafia capo than the FBI's top spy and terrorist catcher in New York.

*he truth was I'd done a lot of favors, public and private, for John O'Neill Pver the seven years since Ramzi Yousef had been kind enough (sort of) to introduce us by trying to blow up the World Trade Center. Among other Kerns, I'd helped him investigate the murder of Freddie Woodruff, an American diplomat in Tbilisi. He needed me, too, because the State Department was doing anything and everything to cover up the fact that a Murder had occurred at all.

"How the fuck do you shoot someone in a car with an AK-47 and not bfeak a window or pierce the skin?" O'Neill asked one lunch over a pair of Slngle-malts at the Palm.

I had the same question. Woodruff had been stationed with the U.S. etnbassy in Tbilisi, in Georgia, when an off-duty soldier fired a single round nrough the back of Woodruff's Neva, miraculously passing between the

rear window and the skin of the car. (Okay, there was a hole in the rubber seal, but it sure looked as if it had been made with a pen.) The police called it an accident. O'Neill's and my hypothesis was 180 degrees different: Someone probably stopped the car, pulled Woodruff out, shot him in the back of the head, and stuffed him in the rear seat. But we were a minority. The Georgian version was just fine with the State Department. This was 1994: Washington couldn't get enough of Eduard Shevardnadze, the Georgian president. Better to bury the dead and swallow some half-assed explanation that didn't even bother with ballistics than risk upsetting a Prince of Perestroika. Unless, like O'Neill and me, you cared about the truth.

I happened to be passing through New York back to Washington when we hashed over Woodruff, so I agreed to snoop around the Mothership and see what I could find that might give John a little ammunition to use against State. Two weeks later, when he was down in Washington visiting his own headquarters, I had him out to Langley, forced a government coffee down his throat, and showed him a defector's report that said Russian military intelligence, the GRU, had assassinated Woodruff pretty much as O'Neill and I had figured: opened the back of the Neva, popped him with a subsonic assassination round fired from a derringer, then poked the hole in the rubber seal to make it look like a stray, seeing-eye bullet had somehow done the dirty work. Just another GRU "liquid operation." It wasn't the final word, but it sure made a lot more sense than the lie Warren Christopher wanted us to swallow.

I suppose if you had asked either one of us, O'Neill and I both would have said we were friends. To the extent that he truly liked anyone tainted by Langley, I'm certain it was me. I'm pretty sure the reverse was true, too. I've never known a group with more pokers deeper up their asses than the FBI, but that wasn't O'Neill. Still, friendship among the professionally paranoid-and that included both of us-is a peculiar thing. It always comes with a price, always has a quid pro quo, a truth for a truth. Never stop trading. I'd done my turn. It was his now, and he knew it.

"Why didn't you tell me the Agency was following me?" I began.

O'Neill had left his old blue Buick Regal out front in the drop-off lane, a red gyro light on the dash. We leaned against the doors on the driver's side.

"Because they weren't."

"Come on," I said, "they as much as admitted it."

He was firing up a cigar, a lighter so elegant and razor thin that it was impossible to imagine where the wick and flint and whatever the hell else goes into a lighter might fit.

"Max, you forget. I'm the sheriff up here. I own the town." He took a deep puff on the cigar and let the smoke linger in his mouth. "I know those clowns weren't yours."

"And?"

"Right after you called, I sent a car up to the mosque to see what the hell you were up to. My guy was in place before you got there. He thought the Kazak goon was about to clip you when you came outside."

"He was."

"Why do I think he might have saved me a lot of trouble if he had."

I was eyeing a green Plymouth Gallant about ten yards downstream from us, trying to figure out why the traffic cops weren't moving it along.

"At any rate, he got down the plates of the cars that followed you up there. They were registered to Applied Science Research."

"Big deal. An Agency proprietary."

"Google it. Applied Science Research is a publicly held company. You guys got money to burn, but not like that."

He was right. The Agency owned hundreds of phony shelf companies, usually operated out of the offices of broke lawyers who'd do anything for a nuck. But it never owned publicly held companies. Cost aside, it couldn't r'sk an SEC investigation or a shareholder suit.

"It doesn't make sense," I said. "There was a guy at my show trial- green retiree badge, bifocals. He all but admitted it was his team. He had to** counterespionage."

"Did he tell you that? Or did you assume it?"

"Assume what? Counterespionage?"

"No. That he was one of yours, and not a retiree working for some

Beltway bandit." O'Neill was trying to put his now-extinguished cigar back in its tube.

"He was there, for crissake. The seventh floor. We're not outsourcing counterintelligence!"

But even as I said it, I knew I could be wrong. The Dulles Corridor was thick with Agency retirees working for Beltway bandits with CIA contracts: SAIC, Booz Allen, DynCorp, Titan, McDonnell Douglas. Everyone I knew seemed to be doing it once they hit the magic fifty: Retire on a Friday, back in the building Monday morning with a shiny new green badge. They usually did scut work: hawking new computers and software, compiling statistics, rewriting accounting regulations. But who cared? They doubled their salaries overnight, while the companies that hired them got experts trained on the taxpayers' tab and a straight shot into the vitals of the CIA, where they could work on landing more contracts so they could make more money so they could fund the reelection campaigns of the favorite congressmen who gladly kept the merry-go-round spinning.

That wasn't the seventh floor's view, of course. It billed outsourcing as a slam-dunk win all the way around. The DCI could boast that he was tapping America's "corporate expertise"-buzzwords Congress loved to hear- even as he was tap-dancing his way around personnel ceilings imposed by the Office of Management and Budget. More to the point, hiring retirees in these jobs was a great way to "keep them in the family"-i.e., buy their silence. A six-figure salary on top of an Agency retirement was a fabulous incentive to make anyone think twice about writing a book or tattling to the press about how dismal things are in the Agency. Your classic golden handcuffs.