Robert Baer - Blow the house down

A cop friend had introduced me a few years earlier to the Amble Inn at 18th Street Northeast and Rhode Island Avenue, maybe forty blocks and five thousand real-estate zones from Frank Beckman's Tuttle Place mansion. The inn was a sanctioned whorehouse, the only one in D.C. The girls rotated in and out, mostly from up and down the eastern seaboard. The police provided protection and laid down a little covering fire when things got nasty, and everyone did a little business and felt better or worse depending when they were through.

I wasn't in the market for what the ladies at the inn and their pimps were selling, and I hadn't exactly crept back into Washington unannounced, but I still needed to fly under the radar as much as I could, and I figured even the refrigerator was wired in my apartment. The Amble Inn was about as close to getting off the grid as D.C. offers.

Willie rolled his eyes when I gave him the address and offered to lend me some money.

"You do know what you're getting into?" he asked as we were nearing 18th Street. "Trust me, I can find you nicer at the same cost. A better chance of sleeping through the night."

Willie waited outside while I checked to see if they would give me a room.

The Indian desk clerk behind a Plexiglas window had equal doubts about my sophistication, especially when I told him I wanted a room for four nights and offered to pay in advance.

"Here?"

A sign just to the left of the clerk's window laid out the house rules: no swearing, loud noises, fighting, or spitting. Below that, another handwritten sign spelled out the rates: twenty-three dollars for two hours, forty dollars a night. Overhead, two cameras recorded my arrival at the Amble Inn for posterity.

"You're alone?"

I nodded.

"You're not planning on causing any trouble, are you?"

"No."

"Good," he said, pushing a key through the tray under the Plexiglas window. "Enjoy."

I stepped out onto the front stoop and put my forefinger to my ear and my thumb to my mouth to let Willie know I'd be calling.

Two cans of St. Ide's malt liquor sat open on top of the window air-conditioning unit. Across the street, a Baskins-Robbins outlet glowed in the night. Next to it, a dozen people trickled out of the International House of Prayer for All People. Their stooped shoulders and frantic smoking suggested an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Just below my own window, a single dim bulb barely illuminated a sign that read amble inn: rear parking.

The TV was a Zenith; the radio wasn't at all. The carpet, a sinister floral swirl, was pocked with cigarette burns, as was the top and, oddly, the sides of the flimsy dresser. Otherwise, the room wasn't half bad. The sheets had actually been changed. The bathroom had a fresh towel. The toilet

flushed and refilled. For twenty dollars an hour I could watch all the porn flicks my heart desired. The comforts of home.

I could hear the door opening in the room next to mine, the squeak of bedsprings, a metronomic thumping of the headboard against the same wall my headboard rested against. "Too big," a woman's voice kept saying in a relentless monotone. "Too big." All night long.

AT ten the next morning I went out to call the galleries of Theodore Hew-Chatworth. Teddy picked up on the first ring. "We're closed. All day," he said, hanging up the phone. I called back. "Teddy, don't hang up." "Who is this?" "Max. Why are you closed?"

"It's none of your business. But since I've been dying to make your day, we were robbed."

O'Neill was probably right about his phone being tapped.

A half block to the east of the inn, the convenience store tacked on to a Shell station offered up an almost drinkable pot of coffee and microwav-able sausage biscuits. I bought one of each, plus a four-pack of lightbulbs, five cans of jumbo lighter fluid, a combination lock guaranteed to "beat the

bad guys every time," and a large spray can of air freshener. I was almost out the door when I remembered copy paper. A package of it sat all alone on a shelf, under a banner that read computer supplies.

Back in my room, I propped the bathroom window open and left the gas can sitting on the sill so it wouldn't stink the place up too badly. Then I started calling around to medical-supply stores until I found one in Northeast D.C. that sold those little pen-size drills emergency-room docs use to make holes in fingernails after they've been slammed with a hammer or in a door. While that was being delivered, I popped down to the Burning Dog next door, nestled among the half dozen people already slouched at the bar, and offered fifty bucks to the first person who could produce for me two live rounds of ammunition.

No one said anything. No one even looked my way. I wasn't surprised. Washington, D.C, might be the world's foremost provider of deadly weapons, but it's illegal to sell a single round of ammo inside the city limits, especially to a middle-aged cracker who wanders off the street. I left a fifty on the bar and went to the bathroom.

When I came back, a pair of nine-millimeter rounds were sitting on the bar and the fifty was gone. I did it five more times.

The medical-supply driver didn't seem to find it odd at all that a guy living in a whorehouse was ordering a pocket-size drill and paying cash for it, which was just fine with me. I sat by the window in my room, cradling the lightbulbs carefully in a pillowcase, and made a bb-size hole in the top of the glass. Next, I pried open the rounds, tipped the charge out onto a piece of creased paper, and used the crease to pour the gunpowder through the hole I'd just drilled. Then, ever so carefully, I removed the lightbulb over the sink basin in the bathroom, replaced it with my new one, and plugged the sink with its stopper.

An ice bucket or something similar would have helped with the next step, but since I didn't have one, I had to settle for the Gideon Bible, spread just enough to stand on end in the bottom of the sink basin. When that was stable, I filled the bottom of the basin with two inches of lighter fluid. Then I took a stack of the blank copy paper, stuffed it in a manila envelope,

rested that on top of the dry end of the Bible, and shut the bathroom door behind me.

When I was ready to leave, I used my new combination lock and the hasp already screwed into the jamb to secure the door behind me. You gotta love a hotel that encourages you to bring your own lock with you.

The rush-hour traffic had just about cleared downtown D.C. as I walked down 9th Street and turned east on D, just across from the FBI headquarters. I stood for a few minutes by the door of the Caucus Room, sizing up the situation. The Caucus was one of those clubby Washington steakhouses that try to give the impression that politics is left at the door when the truth is just the opposite. I was about ready to start across the street when a jovial party burst out the door beside me and fell into a waiting limo: lobbyists dining expensively on some industry group's money. The guy with the chiseled face in the middle of the pack had to be a senator: They all look the same these days-at least all the first-term males do-but I couldn't place him.

By contrast, the agent waiting across the street seemed not to belong in Washington at all. With his sunken chin and off-the-rack green blazer, he reminded me of an H amp;R Block accountant from Norman, Oklahoma. "Chuck Appleton," he said when I walked over to meet him. O'Neill

was right: The FBI intended to slow-speed the meeting. We shook hands, and I followed him down D Street and around the corner to the RMS entrance.

RMS was the Residences at Market Square, a high-priced block of the new Pennsylvania Avenue, diagonally across from the Justice Department and a half block east of the FBI headquarters on D Street. I knew about the apartment we were headed to, number 730. Everyone who was halfway inside the loop knew about it. Number 730 was occupied by a cheery homosexual who did dirty jobs for the Agency and the Bureau and got to live rent-free in return. ("Rent-free" but not inconvenience-free: When the condo got claimed for off-campus get-togethers such as this-which it frequently did-the occupant of record had to kill time someplace else.)