Robert Baer - Blow the house down

He barked out A number, listened to it convert, waited for the ring. Beyond the window, acres and acres of sagebrush rolled down to Sun Valley in the distance. "Institute for a Fair Peace. Donald Sherley's office." The man had a secretary answer his cell phone?

"Institute for Fuck-All. David Channing's office." He spoke in a high, mincing voice.

Sherley was on in an instant. "David!"

"The memo is idiotic, for crissake. I-di-ot-ic!"

"Now, David-"

"'New Challenges, New Opportunities'? How about 'Do We Really Need to Let the Crazies Take Over the Middle East?'"

"I hardly-"

"And the figures for the Shia are all wrong. Kuwait thirty percent? Change it to fifty-two percent. Who the hell's going to know. Certainly not State or the limp-dick CIA. Same for Iraq. Round the sixty-two-point-five percent up to seventy. The Saudis? Three-point-three percent Shia? Can't anyone do math? Make it fourteen percent and add a footnote in twenty-four-point Helvetica bold that the Saudi Shia sit on ninety percent of Saudi oil. And drop Qatar. A cat's litter box I don't give a shit about."

"Our litter box, David."

"You fucking dope. I don't know why I give your pathetic goddamn institute a single penny."

He threw the memo across the room, pages flying in every direction; sent his red pen scudding after them.

"Jesse!"

One, two, three, four… Jesse showed up in five seconds flat, the gold standard. He loved the man, loved the effect of the full-butler outfit and his chalky black skin against the seamless, concrete-gray walls, loved the way Jesse was framed just now in one of the large angular windows. He loved Idaho in this late-summer light; loved the cold evenings, the wolves he could hear howling late into the night; loved the fact that Jesse was not fucking his wife the way Nils had been fucking her. (Not cause enough, of course, to dismiss Nils-the man was a brilliant pilot-but he would have to pay the piper eventually.)

"Jesse, have you been studying your catechism?"

"Yes, sir. Indeed, I have."

"Wonderful. Wonderful! Take a seat!"

He did, in a severe side chair centered beneath a Chuck Close self-portrait: huge, hugely ugly. A Donald Judd sculpture-a vast peaked

monolith-stood against the blank wall opposite him. Channing paced back and forth in front of him like a deranged schoolmaster.

"The key to long-term stability in the Middle East, Jesse, is…"

"Destabilization of the existing status quo, sir."

"To be replaced by…?"

"Shia republics from Iraq to Oman, sir."

"Contained by…?"

David Channing heard some kind of jangling coming from one of the nearby spaces, the click click click of heels on the heart pine floors. His wife.

"Go away," he shouted out.

The heels kept clicking, kept coming in his direction, like a goddamn tsunami. He waited until she was almost in sight to speak again.

"That decrepit motel next to the ski lift-I want you to go over there right now and buy the closest unit to the lift. I want the parking space. I'm sick of having to haul my skis all that goddamn way every winter."

"Did you have a figure in mind?" Vanessa Channing's voice was pure honey-she hated hauling her skis, too. She'd been lobbying for one of the ex-motel-unit condos all summer long.

"A hundred ninety-five thousand. Not a penny more."

"Good luck," she said.

"Two hundred and fifty, then. You and Nils can use the condo for a love nest."

"Go fuck yourself."

"If only I could."

Vanessa signaled Jesse to disappear, but he was already halfway to the kitchen wing. Something had to be done-canapes made, pillows plumped, the cook weaned off his cocaine, at least for the evening. Guests were coming: an ex-ambassador, an ex-movie star, an ex-senator. That's how she thought of Sun Valley: the land of exes, of honorables, of once-had-beens. She wanted to throw up half the time she was here.

"You're pathetic, David."

She was wearing jeans, a denim work shirt, enough diamonds to buckle the fingers of a weaker woman.

"Me?" he screamed. "Me? Donald Judd is pathos? Glenn Close, Chuck Close, whatever the fuck his name is-that's pathos? Nine pages in Architectural Digest is pathos? Look out that window. Look all the way to Sun Valley. I could buy it all!"

"Aren't we forgetting that Daddy's money is about dried up? That you've run through it like goose fat through a dog? Thank God he died when he did."

"Shut up. Shut up! What about the voice-recognition company?"

"Shitty hardware," Vanessa said. "You've heard how the damn thing grinds away. Shitty software. The company's in the tank."

"It's not."

"Of course it is. I read the financials. Someone around here has to actually understand a balance sheet."

"You don't know-"

"Michelle talks to me, David. I'm the one she does talk to. I don't treat her like a rug."

He was picking up the memo pages scattered across the floor, collating them, stacking the pages together as he went.

"I've got work to do," he said as he stood up.

"Your little institute?"

He'd turned, was walking away. She put a hand on his shoulder and spun him around.

"Your pretensions, David, are sickening."

"What?"

"Your butler-in-livery. Your Jew-baiting. Your Harvard-is-shit. It's all sickening. Don't you understand, David? You're a garden-variety bigot all wrapped up in big theories. And now you're going under because you don't understand diddly-squat about making money."

"You don't know anything."

"You lost Oliver's money. Every penny."

Somehow Vanessa had grabbed the Times off the table and rolled it up

without his seeing her do it. She hit him with it once on the side of his face and once on his ear. When he looked up again, she'd turned to leave, her heels click-clicking. The bitch.

He walked down a long, cork-lined hallway until he came to his desk and, beyond it, nothing but blue sky through the floor-to-ceiling window. A plasma screen rose like Lazarus out of the ash-black desktop. He studied the oil quotes, short and long trades, spot prices, wet buys: a day out, a week out, a year out.

Channing had just finished when the fax he kept locked in his wall safe (the safe encased in tons of concrete, the concrete reinforced by hundreds of yards of stainless-steel tie-rods) began to chime. He could hear the fax humming, gurgling softly. When it was through, he spun the dials and picked out a single page, handwritten, as beautiful as any Michelangelo:

Primzahlen unter a (=) a/la

… followed by a string of numbers. The numbers looked randomly generated, but he would bet his wife's plastic surgeon's bill that they had been prompted by an algorithm written in ten minutes. That's why his father had nicknamed the man the Genius. No one could do numbers theory like him.

"He was a supernova, David!" He could hear the old man saying it even now. "His dissertation, non-Riemannian hypersquares, was all of two pages, yet they had to send it around to five universities"-here, his father would always hold up five fingers and fan them just to drive the point home-"five, just to figure out what he was talking about."

That was back when he and Dear Papa still talked to each other. The Halcyon Days. Hah.

David Channing pulled out his Palm Pilot, typed in the sequence of numbers the Genius had faxed, and decoded them: CH3-0-N02. What the fuck is that? Is he playing a joke?

He picked up the phone, called Nils, and read off the chemical compound's notation. Nils had majored in something like that, somewhere in some other country.

"Methyl nitrate," Nils said.

"Hah."

Of course. Odorless. Colorless. More powerful than nitroglycerin.

He wrote a note to himself: "Find out temperature methyl nitrate burns."

He thought of his father. The venerable fraud had fancied himself the superior of Acheson, the Dulleses, Kennan, Kissinger. Naturally. Not one of them could see beyond the Soviets; beyond Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin; beyond their ridiculous "dominoes" and containment. Only Oliver Wendell Channing saw the world as it was. Just ask him.