Robert Baer - Blow the house down

So I had. We headed to the elevator.

I offered to have coffee or tea sent up, but India immediately popped into the bathroom, extended one delicate arm out the slightly cracked door with a plastic dry-cleaning bag containing all her dripping wear, and stepped into the shower while I called laundry.

A half hour later steam was still pouring out under the door.

"Hey!" she called out. "Let's celebrate. How about a bottle of Bollinger? And why don't you get into something dry. " As she spoke, the bathroom door cracked open again and a terry-cloth robe came flying out.

The Bollinger and India's newly dry wear arrived together twenty minutes later, just as she was stepping out of the bathroom-or steam-bath, it was hard to tell-wrapped in a towel. Her flushed, angular face and the raven hair plastered close to her scalp would have driven Modigliani straight back to his easel.

We stood quietly by the window, sipping our champagne and watching sheets of rain buffeting the lake. Finally, I pointed to the tidy pile on the desk.

"Your clothes," I said, but she just shook her head no, took my hand, and starting leading me toward the bed.

Looking back on it now, I think that's the moment in this horrible skein I felt the sickest over. I fed India the bait, and she took it, hook, line, and sinker. I'd recruited her.

The truth jabbed me in the brain like a cranial probe. The faxes, the transcripts of KSM's calls, the methyl nitrate, Frank's options trades had all been boring deeply into my thoughts while India slept softly on my shoulder. Then I remembered a seminar on methyl nitrate I'd attended at the FBI Training Academy in Quantico maybe two years earlier. I knew little about it before, and still don't understand the chemistry today, but the practical effects were staggering. It was completely plausible for KSM to introduce the stuff into the fuel system of a plane. The plane would blow up into millions of pieces and devour the evidence in the conflagration. He could do the same with a refinery-somehow introduce it into the flow, and the whole thing blows apart. The only calling card methyl nitrate leaves behind is a bright ocher hue as it burns, not the orange-red flash of burning gasoline or jet fuel.

"Time the explosion to happen over the ocean, and only the albatrosses

and fishies will know," the instructor had told us. "Forensics cannot detect methyl nitrate residue, unlike with conventional explosives."

I sat bolt upright in bed. KSM was going to use "liquids" that would never be traced. And it was so much easier than trying to get plastic explosives on a plane. It was a foolproof way to protect his options trade. It couldn't be anything else. The question now was when.

India was awake. "What time is it?"

The room was dark. There was no traffic on the Quai du Mont-Blanc. I looked over at the clock on the nightstand. A little after three, I told her.

"Max, are you okay?"

"I will be. First tell me again about Vernon Lawson." Intuition leads. Facts follow. Somewhere in my descent-into-hell dream I'd been having, I'd seen the face of the journalist-whore who was ready to deliver my balls on a platter to readers of the Times and anywhere else willing to pick up the story.

India sat up beside me, plumped pillows for both of us, and as we sat there skin to skin in the dark, she told me what had happened.

It must have been almost six in the evening, she said. She left work early, stopped by a place in Georgetown to pick up some catfish. It wasn't just Simon's night off. The cook was gone, too, and the driver. She was going to bread the filets, then fry them up with red beans and rice, a favorite of Frank's from the old days when money didn't grow on trees.

The library doors were open when she got home. She could see two men sitting with her father. Frank rose immediately to greet her and close the doors before she tried to join them, but she got a good look at the guy I was certain was Vernon Lawson. Her physical description matched him to a tee.

"And Webber," I asked, "did you get a good look at him? Where was he sitting?"

"I'm not sure…"

"Sure of what?"

"Sure that it was Webber."

"But-"

"I never said that, Max. I never…" She let it trail off.

I was ransacking my memory. Hadn't she told me before that Webber was there? Or was it my need that made me hear it that way?

"Whoever it was was sitting off to the side, maybe behind the desk. I didn't get a look before Dad closed the doors."

"India-"

"All I can tell you is what I remember, you understand? You weren't there."

I put my arm around her, pulled her closer to me. She had gone cold all of a sudden. I rubbed her shoulder and neck until whatever it was had passed.

"I didn't care that he didn't invite me in," she began again. "That's Dad. The Old Boys taking care of business."

As she was starting up the stairs, though, she heard my name, or thought she did. Frank shushed whoever said it. That's when India went up to her room and pressed her ear against the floor vent. The third one-not her father, not the journalist-was saying that I was on the dole of some ex-GRU officer. The FBI was dragging its heels, refusing to issue an international fugitives warrant, but it wouldn't do any good even if they did. No one was going to execute it.

As she talked, I tried to imagine what a voice sounds like filtering from the floor below through an air vent. India had told me in Balabakk that Webber had hit on her. Did he send a mash note, a mash e-mail? If not, wouldn't she recognize his voice? And if not from that, then from some staff meeting, an orientation lecture?

"The journalist, Lawson, he said that the Times was ready to run his story that you'd gone to work for a hostile intel service. Then the other person said-"

"Said what?"

"Said that the story had to run as soon as possible. He told Lawson to find whatever confirmation he needed to write it."

"Are you sure?" I interrupted.

"He was adamant about it. You had to be stopped."

"Stopped from what?"

"No one said. Anyhow, Lawson didn't seem to know or care. He just wanted to burn you."

"But it didn't run. Or at least not so far."

"Believe me, Max. I don't know why."

Another dead end.

India reached over, patted my hand. "What did you say to Dad to make him so angry?"

"When he called me a well-hit three-wood in a tile bathroom?" It still hurt. Maybe because he wasn't that far off.

"A truth for a truth: It's your own rule, Max. Dad used to say you were damaged goods. I was always intrigued. I never knew what he meant. Are you?"

Ami?

"He said something had happened to you when you were a kid. I don't think even he knew what it was, but he said you would never get over it."

"He was right."

"Did you?"

"No. Not really, I guess. Just compensated around it the way people do in life."

"So," India said.

"So?"

"Are you going to tell me?"

"My mother," I began, "was born with the biological capacity to reproduce but with no maternal instincts. She despised me from conception. It was unfortunate. For me at least."

And so for the second time in my life, I told the story.

"Your aunt?" India asked when I was through. "The one who came and got you?"

"My mother's sister. The only one who even knew where we were. The only family I ever cared about. She died last year."

"And your mother?"

I shrugged, turned my palms up. "She used to contact my aunt occasionally. No more. Alive. Dead. I hope the latter."

With that, we sat in silence holding hands. I had been drunk, stoned, a

twenty-year-old college student unpracticed in deceit when I'd told Chris the story. Now I was sober, a liar par excellence, in bed with a woman not much older than I was then, a graduate of the same university. Life has weird circular harmonics, I've found, if we just listen to them. But we move on, too. We become different people. And that night in Geneva, thinking about what I had just recounted and all that had happened over the last months, I felt as if I could almost see my entire life's story coming together: the Baluchs and KSM; Beirut and Buckley; Webber and Frank Beckman and John O'Neill; Murtaza Ali Mousavi and his dentist and Millis's displaced brain; abandonment, loss, and recovery; the search for truth that would never, ever let me alone.