Robert Baer - Blow the house down

"What the fuck did you do while you waited?" Chris wanted to know. "Live in a cave and eat bat shit?"

"Actually it wasn't too bad. A family took me in. They had a son my age. We rode horses, played soccer. I learned Baluch."

"That's fucking bullshit."

And there's the double irony: Of all the cock-and-bull tales I had told Chris in the twenty-odd years since-the weird excuses for not showing, the weirder ones for leaving early, the improbable investment consulting

firm that provided my Washington letterhead, and on and on-I was sure the Baluchistan story was the one he least believed.

"C'mon, Chris," I said. He was back to swapping Nigerian crude. "This'll take ten minutes."

"What in God's name are you talking about now?"

"The favor. All you have to do is stand by the window and watch those

two."

"Why would I want to do that? You really are nuts."

"Maybe. But my hunch is that they're tailing someone in this building- maybe one of your colleagues; hell, maybe even your boss."

Chris looked at me as if he was deciding whether to call security.

"It happens, sweetheart. Honest. The husband's sitting on his ass at home, laid off and stewed on midday martinis. Suddenly it dawns on him that the mother of his children has hooked up with the mailroom boy, so he calls in a private eye, and bingo! Fireworks hit the fan."

"Yeah, sure."

"It's a fabulous business these days," I pushed it. "Everyone's screwing everyone." Rule Seven: Create the context before you risk a truth. Rule Eigjjt: Don't let the context twist in the wind. "Or maybe they're watching me."

"Right, Max. And I'm Princess Di and you're Dodi whatever the hell his name was. Drop the paranoid act. No one's following you."

Chances are he was right. (The why, for one thing, left a hole big enough to drive the Pyramids through.) But high-octane paranoia is as addictive as morphine and far more useful. There is no such thing as an accident, no coincidence, no luck-they taught us that on day one at the Farm.

I'll never forget Joe Lynch, the course director, walking up behind the podium that first morning and, without so much as a nod, asking, "Who ran a countersurveillance route coming here just now?" All of us wide-eyed career trainees looked around the auditorium, trying to decide if Lynch was joking. The Farm is a maximum-security facility with more deer than people. Only one road of any consequence runs through it. You'd have to be Vin Diesel with brains to even get inside the place. Still, Lynch had made his point: Always assume you're being tailed even when you are sure

you're not. It's the only way to keep your edge, not get sloppy, not get caught.

I couldn't tell Chris any of that, of course. Like a lot of friendships, ours depended on a certain degree of ambiguity, augmented in my case- and maybe in his, too-with a healthy dose of harmless virtual reality. A moral no-man's-land.

"Listen," I said, "I was seeing this girl, and…"

Chris bit, back on familiar ground once more.

"Bound to happen," he said with a shrug.

"What?"

"Hundreds of women. One Max. One of 'em was bound to get pissed off enough to come after you."

"Chris, listen-"

"I mean it, Max. You really are like a goddamn alley cat. You slink in and out of people's lives. Me, I don't mind that much. I'm not looking to bed you down, but-"

"The point is…"

"Remember that chewing-gum heiress who was stuck on you way back when? Get it? Stuck on you. What did that last? Seven months? A fucking world record. After Marissa."

In fact, I'd already asked Chris to be my best man when it dawned on me that I liked having sex with the heiress more than I liked her, just about the same time she realized that she preferred the idea of me to me in person.

"Youthful indiscretions," I said. I needed to get Chris back on track. "Lookit, this little piece of work is different. Very vindictive. Worse, she's got the money to indulge her anger."

"What's her name?"

Name? Volunteer nothing, and never give up a detail you absolutely don't have to.

"I cut her off cold," I said. "No five stages of grief with this one. Just checked out. Left her steaming. I wouldn't put it past her to put a tail on me, or worse. Chris, I could use a little help here."

Chris turned serious again. "Come on, Max, we're too old for this. I've got work to do. You can watch the watchers yourself."

"That's precisely what I can't do. If I do something stupid like walk out of here and look over my shoulder, bend over to tie my shoe, or stare into a display window to see what's going on behind me, they'll know I spotted them."

"So? Isn't that the point?"

"Yeah, you do that and whoever is running this little show will bring in a new team I won't spot. It's the way these things work."

Chris wasn't buying into it, but he hadn't said no. It was up to me to close the deal.

"Trust me," I told him, "this chick is totally unzipped, a psycho. She'll do me harm given the chance. I gotta know sooner rather than later whether she's got a tail on me."

I picked Chris's cell phone up off the desk, poked my cell number into it, and put it back down in front of him. "See this little button with the green telephone on it? Push that in ten and tell me what happens. That's all you have to do."

Chris tapped his fingers on the desk, adjusted his neck in his starched white collar, shot his wrist out from an equally starched and beautiful tailored French cuff, and gave his watch a good looking-over.

XDkay, okay. But you know, Max, it's not easy having you as a friend."

He rolled his wrist a few more times just to make sure I didn't miss what was wrapped around it. The watch looked as if it had cost enough to feed an entire Afghan village for years.

"A new toy, eh?"

"A Breitling." He was beaming. "It's got a micro-transmitter in it that works anywhere in the world."

"In case you get kidnapped?"

"No, asshole, I bought it for sailing."

I laughed. "Yeah, just the ticket next time you're blown out of Long Island Sound and end up lost in the Azores."

"One thing, Max. How do you know that that's the way these things work?"

"What things?"

"Not tipping off a tail."

There was something new in Chris's voice-a genuine curiosity. Maybe he was seeing me for the first time as I was, not as he wanted me to be. Maybe he was thinking about dumping his own little side plate. At this point, I didn't care.

"Some guy I met in a bar," I said. "He told me all about it."

"Baton Rouge, this is Selma. Che's on the move. South on Park.' "Roger that. We'll take it from here. Over."

Always dress to fit someone else's story line. If that means a sensible black cocktail dress, suck in your stomach, slip it on, and go shopping for a strand of pearls and size-sixteen pumps. I could no longer remember who told me that-some Old Boy, six gins to the breeze, like they all are these days-but it was another piece of advice I'd never forgotten. To Chris, my worn-at-the-elbows linen jacket, baggy olive chinos, and scuffed maroon loafers said gentleman consultant, a guy who didn't need to drape himself in hand-stitched Hugo Boss to set his table. For my fellow pedestrians waiting to cross Park at Forty-eighth, my clothes and dead-on stare-immune to noise, traffic, skyscrapers, muggers, usurious bankers, fee gougers, and prying eyes-typecast me as someone who had wandered out of the Upper West Side on his day off. Trouble was, I didn't know what script the surveillance team in front of Quick amp;c Reilly was reading from… if it was a tail, if they could read, if I wasn't just listening to the squirrels racing around that cage I call a brain.

I crossed with the light, then headed for the underground passage to Grand Central Station. I wanted to take a quick look up Park in the direction of the Quick amp;c Reilly pair, but flying on instruments was the only way. If I was going to have any eyes in this game, they would belong to my old pal Chris, twelve stories above me. It was up to him to decide whether or not to use them.