Robert Baer - Blow the house down

I was out the underground ramp and halfway across the Grand Central concourse, flogging myself with the usual self-doubts, when my cell phone chirped cheerfully in my jacket pocket.

"I told you you're nuts. As soon as you crossed Park, they took off. No one's following you, Max. No-"

"What direction?"

"What what?"

"North, south, east, west? Manhattan's laid out on a grid, you know."

"North. Uptown."

"When did they move? Be exact, Chris. It's important."

I had my eyes on a Middle Eastern-looking student carrying a pizza box just right for a ten-pound load of plastique. Maybe a platter charge to levitate the 11:53 to Poughkeepsie.

"The two of them left just as soon as you crossed Park and headed south."

"They walked north, right? Went on foot?"

"No. Someone picked them up and drove them up Park."

"Someone?"

"A van."

"Hotel van? JFK shuttle?"

"How would I know? It didn't have anything written on the-"

"Did it have a sound stick on top?"

"A what?"

"An antenna. Short. Stubby. Maybe-"

"I didn't-"

"Were other people in it?"

"I couldn't tell. There weren't any passenger windows. You couldn't see in. Max, Jesus, I was looking out a twelfth-story window!"

"You dumb guinea peacock. A 747 could land on Park and you wouldn't notice. But tell me, how often do you see someone picked up in front of Deutsche Bank in a windowless van?"

"All the time. Never. It's not something I ever think about."

"Maybe you should."

"Uh, Max. It's not me who wants to hear you singing soprano in the choir."

"Thanks. You're a dear." I shut off the cell phone before Chris could say anything more.

What bothered me about the Quick amp; Reilly pair wasn't so much their existence as their tradecraft. They should have been doing sentry duty way down Park or watching from inside that unmarked van they were picked up in. Or they could have used some cover, like climbing in and out of a manhole in monkey suits. Even a vendor's cart. New York City is 40 percent foreign born. If you can't disguise yourself in that thicket of humanity, where can you? The van pickup didn't make sense either. Why not just break off on foot?

The easy explanation was ineptitude, but there was another possibility: They'd exposed themselves on purpose. In Moscow we called it "dolphin surveillance"-now you see us, now you don't. The way it worked was the KGB would start off with a sloppy team on you. You'd have to be blind not to pick up on it. Then, maybe an hour or two later, the team would drop off, disappear completely. You couldn't even find their comms on your pocket scanner. It was as if the whole damn service had taken the afternoon off for a company picnic.

The idea was to lure you into a false sense of security, give you the impression you were sparkling clean so you would go ahead and make your meeting, put down a drop, do whatever. But what really was going on was that the KGB had switched out the sloppy team for the pros. And it wasn't just new people and new vehicles. They enlisted fixed militia posts and the police to call in your movements while the real watchers hung back out of sight. They also switched to military frequencies-so much traffic that a scanner was useless.

That was Moscow, though. Who in New York would even know about dolphin surveillance? More to the point, who would use it on me, a tax-paying American on his own hook in the Free World's Capital of Commerce?

I'd almost convinced myself that the simplest answers are best when I pushed out the door to Forty-second Street and saw a guy exiting two doors down. Early forties, maybe. An elegant summer-weight cashmere sport coat topped by a screaming orange baseball cap. This time, at least, I hadn't completely lost it. There's nothing wrong with keeping your head covered, but a piece of crap like that in a 250-watt color on top of a pricey cashmere jacket?

Chances are, this guy was the "eye"-the point man for the surveillance team, the sacrificial lamb who sticks to the target so the rest of the team can hang back out of sight. Follow the orange hat, and they're following me. Simple, and way too much work for the little reward I offered. A reasonable person would have simply caught the shuttle to Penn Station, climbed on the next Amtrak back to Washington, and opted out of the game. Chase over. Go home. But for a guy who pretty much lies for a living, I'm perversely attached to the truth. I had to know if I was being followed and, if so, who it was. Who would lead me to why.

First, though, I had to clean myself up-dump my cell phone, not wash my hands. Cells these days are not a lot different from those electronic bracelets used to monitor prisoners serving home sentences. Like Chris's Breitling, they have built-in beacons that constantly transmit your position, your GPS coordinates. Even when a phone's off, it keeps transmitting. A lot of supposedly street-savvy people think that removing the battery fixes the problem, but the pros aren't that dumb.

A couple weeks before, I'd dozed through an afternoon listening to some genius from the National Security Agency explain how he could conceal a capacitor in a cell phone to power its beacon. You can't find the capacitor unless you take the whole thing apart, he swore-and know exactly (his emphasis, not mine) what you are looking for.

Was my phone tricked? Possibly. Did I want to chance it? Definitely not, but I couldn't just toss the phone in the nearest USPS mailbox. For one

thing, I'd be seen and lose the element of surprise. Worse, the FBI carries keys to mailboxes. If that's who was on me, they'd be crawling through my SIM card-the unique chip every cell phone operates off-before I got to Sixty-first Street. I had probably a couple hundred contacts stored on it. I wasn't giving those up to anyone without a fight. I needed a real drop, and I knew the perfect place.

I headed up Madison fast enough to string out surveillance behind me, then darted across the street at Fifty-fifth against the light, grazing a cab. The Sikh hacker celebrated my victory over death by rolling down his window and cursing me in Punjabi. Bhenchot! But this wasn't the time to stop and tell him I didn't have a sister, that one child was way too much for dear old Mom. Half a block later, I ducked into the showroom of the Sony building, raced through without breaking stride, and headed straight to the trash can in front of the Starbucks coffee bar on the backside. Surveillance would have had to have been inside the can to see my cell phone filtering down through the crushed cups and napkins. "Can I help you, sir?" "A grande double latte con brio with hints of the Costa Rican sunset,

and bold the mayo."

"Huh?"

My server, if that's what she was called, had a sterling-silver safety pin stuck through her nose. Other than that, she looked like a Girl Scout from

Kansas.

"House brew. Large," I amended. She almost laughed.

Reinforced paper cup in hand, I found a seat and paged through a well-fingered New York Post. The idea was to give surveillance a chance to catch up. When I figured that even an AARP flying squad could have gotten itself in place, I carefully folded the paper, returned it to the counter, and headed for the street. Time to move out and draw fire-Plan B.

"All units, this is Selma. Che holding steady at five-five-oh Madison.

Repeat, Che steady at- " "Selma, Selma, this is Oxford."

"Five-five-oh Madison, between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth." "Selma-" "Oxford?" "Che just crossed Sixty-first on foot…"

Half of everything I know about spotting surveillance I owe to Wild Bill Mulligan, my first boss in India, and it took just a single lesson. "Boy-o," he said one day as we sat on the veranda at the Bombay Yacht Club, "the trick is to always look at the feet, the shoes. And in a pinch, pants. A good surveillance team carries along reversible jackets, neck braces, red straw hats, a raft of accessories from shopping bags to umbrellas, dogs to a watermelon-anything to distract you. Sleights of hand. But what they almost never do is change shoes. It's awkward. Takes time. Shoes are hard to carry. Always watch the shoes."