Robert Baer - Blow the house down

India had laughed when I'd walked across the Quai du Mont-Blanc a half hour earlier carrying a dead pigeon in a plastic bag. She'd thought I'd gone completely nuts, and when I began stuffing the bird down the barrel of the pneumatic gun to show her how it worked, she was sure of it. But she understood when I explained. If an alarm goes off and the police come, the smashed glass and dead pigeon explain the alarm: a simple avian flight malfunction. It wouldn't take care of the closed-circuit camera, but I figured we'd be out of Switzerland before anyone checked the feed.

"I'm going to shoot a dead bird at a window?"

"That's how it works, dear. The good news is that no policeman in Switzerland would have the nerve to haul you in for it. He'd be laughed off the force. Just be sure to clear the area before the police actually arrive."

As the pigeon gun suggests, this wasn't exactly a professional break-in. To do that you need a hundred people on the street: a ten- to twelve-person surveillance team watching each and every person with twenty-four-hour access to the building just in case someone makes a surprise visit to the target site, and a dozen other watchers with radios on the approaching streets in case the police answered a silent alarm you didn't know about. And then there's the actual team: a specialist for electric alarms, another for motion detectors, a safe cracker. I had to work with what I had.

I let myself in again and walked up to the third floor. Zwanzig's lock gave up as easily as the one downstairs, and I didn't have to worry about replacing it. The big question now was what was waiting inside. Normally, a

break-in crew sticks a fiber-optic probe under the door to take a look around for the alarm system. Jean-Marc didn't have one, and I didn't have a week to wait for him to get one. Instead, the hope was that the ultrasound generator would disable a motion detector. Open the door slowly. Push the generator through. Turn it on. Pray. I did. There was no alarm, or at least no audible one. And I was inside.

As I suspected, Zwanzig's office was as neat as a pin: a wall of three-ring binders, two tasteful etchings, a kid leather couch and matching chair, and in the corner a four-foot-high safe with a dial. I looked everywhere, even behind the pictures and in the closets, but there were no safe-deposit boxes. Either India got it wrong or Zwanzig transferred her clients' paper into the safe. Now I would have to try my luck with the safe. I attached the dialer and started it spinning.

In the meantime, I went to look for Zwanzig's computer. Her drawers were as tidy as the rest of her office, pencils neatly aligned in one compartment, pens in another. But no computer, no laptop, no Palm Pilot, no nothing. I went through all the closets. Nothing there, either. The spin dialer was still spinning-running through all the possible combinations could take a couple hours. While I was waiting, I started in on the three-ring binders.

The labels on the outside all seemed to be about watering holes for posh souls: San Remo, Gstaad, and on and on. Inside the folders, though, the contents had nothing to do with vacations. The first thing I came to in the Gstaad folder was a telefax from Zwanzig to UBS AG, the Swiss mega-bank, ordering the transfer of six million dollars from a numbered account in Venezuela to a Qatari prince's account. The entire binder was full of similar transfers, some for even more money, some for much more. 1 pulled down the binders one after another looking for transfers connected to either Frank or Channing. I even looked for something with Webber's name on it.

I heard the spin dialer click. It had picked up the first number of the safe combination. I stood watching it as number two caught. Number three fell in place another minute later. I pulled down the handle and the safe swung open.

I didn't know what to expect, but if Michelle Zwanzig had left the kind of stuff I'd found in the binders in open view, she had to have something pretty incredible sitting on those shelves in front of me, maybe even the keystone I was looking for, the one that would nail down my suspicions with facts.

On the top shelf of the safe was an eighteen-page computer-generated sheet of "calls," option swaps and credits to banks. I quickly skimmed through them. They were all related to oil futures, oil service companies, oil companies. Whoever owned the calls was paying only two cents on the dollar. If Halliburton stock rose more than ten dollars, the owner was going to make a fortune. If the price of oil went up five dollars, Exxon was a gold mine.

I kept looking, still sure there had to be something related to airline stocks. But there wasn't. I rifled through the paper on the shelf underneath. Nothing about airline options there, either. So much for my theory about a reprise of KSM's plane-bombing scheme. Instead, I found a dozen letters from David Channing, instructing that profits from calls be paid to a score of accounts around the world. I looked for anything with BT Trading on it, but there had to be six inches of paper on that shelf. It would take me at least an hour to go through it.

I'd started looking through the papers when the window behind me shattered. The pigeon didn't make it through-I'd thought the bird was too light-but the broken glass was all I needed. I couldn't hear a klaxon. But India had to be warning me that the police were on the way.

I jammed as much paper as I could from the safe into a plastic shopping bag I'd brought along, then pulled off the spin dialer and stuffed it in the safe along with the ultrasound generator, the monkey suit, the drill, and the rest of the stuff I'd come in with. Then I squirted Gorilla Glue into the safe's key locks and behind the dial. The repair company would scratch its head for a day before it drilled the thing open. More than enough time to get out of Switzerland.

I ran downstairs and out the front door and almost tripped on something. I looked down and saw a woman in her seventies with a beet-red

face and a bleached Heidi haircut. She was maybe five feet tall and not even a hundred pounds. She had a key in her right hand.

"La clef ne marche plus "-the key doesn't work anymore-she said, looking at me for an explanation.

Just as I recognized the voice behind the squawk box, she took a hard look at me.

"C'est vous!" she screamed. She pulled a cell phone out of her purse and screamed into it even before dialing. "I've caught a thief! I've caught a thief!" People on the street stopped to look at her, and then me. I considered running but I knew that within a block I'd have a hundred people after me.

I looked behind me to make sure India had taken off. I couldn't see her.

"Thief!" the woman screamed. There was a crowd gathering around us.

I was about ready to surrender when I heard India's voice. "What are you saying?" she yelled as she pushed her way through.

The woman turned around, surprised that anyone would dare interfere with the course of Swiss justice.

"Leave him alone. You're crazy," India said.

"He-"

"He didn't do anything," India said, her voice now calmer. India's French was flawless.

"Mais- "

"Mais merde! We're here waiting for Ms. Michelle Zwanzig. Floor three. Private Investment Services. She represents my family." There was something almost regal in her manner. She expected an apology-no question about it. Now.

"Give me your cell phone and talk to her yourself," she said, her voice now back to normal.

The woman dialed a number, no doubt Zwanzig's home. India took the phone from her.

"Michelle, it's India. India Beckman. Dad wanted me to come see you… Yes… No, I don't know why. Documents for your safekeeping, I suppose. I have them with me. Dad told me this time; he must have thought

you would be here. We'd been ringing your bell. The downstairs door was open. My friend went inside to see if he could ring up to your office. And now this lady is accusing him of breaking in. She's insufferable." She was actually stamping her foot as she said it. "Would you mind talking to her?"