Robert Baer - Blow the house down

Which is just what I was doing as I made my way up Madison Avenue. Fortunately, now that I had moved out of Midtown, people were fewer and farther between. So light was the sidewalk traffic as I cleared Sixty-second Street that I had time to focus my attention on a pair of extraordinarily fine and extremely unlikely suspects, neither more than a size six. When they

turned into the Chanel store at Sixty-fourth, I thought, Why not? Browsing Chanel the way I was dressed was one sure way of drawing fire, on me and on anyone else who might find a couple thousand bucks a little steep for a crepe de chine blouse, even if the silk had been spun by free-range worms.

The door had just closed behind me when it popped back open and in walked a doughy guy in his mid-fifties, brick face, bad comb-over, scarlet Ohio State vinyl jacket, polyester pants, and spotless white sneakers. He looked even more out of place in Chanel than I did, but the point is I was almost certain I'd seen him walking toward me ten blocks earlier. If I was right, I was now being tailed from in front, not behind.

In the business, it's called a "waterfall." Whoever is in charge of the operation runs a hundred or more people at you in a constant stream. Two or three blocks after they've passed you by, they peel off onto a side street, get picked up by vehicles and ferried on a parallel street up above you, changing appearance every inch of the way, and then the whole process starts over again. I needed more evidence to be certain, but this little game was starting to take on a distinct smell.

The two size-sixes I'd followed inside were already being treated to a private fashion show, complete with midday flutes of champagne. I might have joined them if a manager hadn't floated in front of my face just then and asked if he could help me in a voice that suggested he'd rather walk naked through a landfill. I was turning for the door when he aimed the same question at Ohio State.

"Just browsing," the man mumbled.

I ducked out in the confusion.

Three blocks later, as I crossed Sixty-seventh Street, I took a peek to my left and sent a silent prayer to Wild Bill. There they were, those Puma arsenic-orange, powder-blue sneakers I'd last seen in front of Quick amp;c Reilly, only now they were attached to the feet of a woman in a long mouse-gray raincoat and a Phrygian knit cap. Apart from being out of season, the cap, I was sure, was hiding lavender highlights, but the sneakers, you could have spotted from a KH-11 satellite, ninety-two miles up.

By now I was crisscrossing Madison, checking out art and antiques stores. Every run needs a logic that the surveillance team can buy into, and the East Sixties and Seventies are peppered with the kind of places I had decided to make today's theme. Better still, since the shops and galleries are so close together, no one had to work very hard. I'd learned long ago that the best way to manage a surveillance team is to lull it into complacency. Make the chase easy on them, let them take in the sights, and never, ever piss them off. If you do, they're sure to download the flak on you.

At Sixty-eighth Street, I made a right, walked down a few doors, rang the bell at #14-a handsome brownstone and home to the world-famous galleries of Theodore Hew-Chatworth-and waited for the buzzer that would admit me to the stairs that would allow me entry to the second-floor showroom. If anyone was going to follow me in, he would either have to fast-rope off the roof or buzz the same buzzer and walk up the same flight of stairs I was climbing. Theodore was waiting for me himself, ever the gentleman.

"Fuck you, flyface," he said as he opened the door-an improvement, actually, over the last time we met.

We had issues. Teddy was a small-time Texas con man until he copped two-to-five years for accepting tuition payments for a chain of imaginary day-care centers. No fool, he used his cell time to acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of Oriental art and an accent that, except in certain circumstances, would do an Anglican bishop proud. Back on the outside, he headed straight for New York to do his apprenticeship. Today he was one of the nation's foremost dealers in Chinese antiques, but he'd never entirely escaped the con man he used to be.

A decade earlier, a police dog had discovered a handsome cache of heroin, pure China white, packed inside a shipment of vases meant for Teddy's store. The charge didn't stick-Teddy claimed his forwarders in Macau were freelancing-but while they were looking into the case, investigators stumbled upon something that could have put him out of business for good. Antique porcelains are certified by thermoluminescence testing. Don't ask: It's to porcelains what carbon dating is to fossils. What matters is that Teddy and his Beijing partners developed a technique to scam the

test so they could sell fake Chinese blue and white as the real thing. It gave me enough leverage to talk Teddy into running ops for us during his frequent trips to China. He never took the assignment gracefully, though.

"Your phone," I said, nodding at the sleek cordless Siemens on his desk.

Phone in hand, I headed down the long side hallway to a bathroom marked Employees Only, locked myself inside, and phoned the Special Agent in charge of the FBI's National Security Division. If the Bureau's gumshoes were on me, John O'Neill would know it.

His secretary answered the phone.

I was two sentences into whatever lie I had concocted when O'Neill himself burst onto the line in all his larger-than-life glory.

"Max, you asshole, what are you doing on my turf? If you're up here operating, I'm gonna make sure you spend a cozy night at Rikers."

"Me? You're the one running the op."

"What are you talking about?"

"I got surveillance."

"Oh, bullshit."

"They're like flies at a shit roast."

"Come on."

"Trust me. You can't miss these guys."

"All right. I'll play. Hold on."

He was back in two minutes. "It's not DEA or Customs or One Police Plaza."

It was my turn. With DEA, Customs, and the locals out of the mix, the list of candidates was becoming disturbingly thin. "Are you sure?"

"Well, I could ask again and say 'pretty please' this time."

Point taken.

O'Neill hated silence. "You been drinking?"

"Not yet."

"Well, how about I send a car up and bring you in?"

"Nope, but I might need you later."

"What have you got into now?"

Damned if I knew, but I didn't want to disappoint. O'Neill had once

noted that I had a habit of burning my bridges before I got to them, and history was on his side.

"Hey, John, remember that Black Panther, the one who became a Muslim?"

"It still hurts where he took a bite out of my ass."

"I'm going to go see him."

"The fuck you are. If you so much as-"

I hung up, splashed a little tap water on my face, and ran a quick check on the medicine cabinet. Viagra and crystal meth.

"I was never here, Theodore," I said, buzzing myself out his door.

"If only. Where's my phone?"

"I left it on the back of the crapper."

"You fuck."

"Why don't you run it through the thermoluminescencer. That should take care of the germs."

"All mobile units proceed uptown immediately. Stay close. Oxford has eye."

John O'Neill and I went back to 1993, to the World Trade Center bombing. Our employers were famously antagonistic, and we had done our best at first to keep the cats-and-dogs skit alive. O'Neill never stopped reminding me that he caught bank robbers for his living, while I robbed banks for mine. But sometimes our interests intersected-he put the bad guys behind bars, I turned them-and Ramzi Yousef and his fellow truck bombers eventually brought us together.

I think I might have been the one to come up with the idea of pitching Jamal Mohammad. It doesn't matter now. O'Neill agreed to run it as a joint op and even got things started by digging up some dirt on Jamal from his Black Panther days, back when he had been simply Earl Price. The dirt wouldn't put Jamal behind bars, but it was enough for a gang-plank recruitment a la the Great Hew-Chatworth. And it wasn't like we were asking for the moon. We just wanted Jamal to travel to Tehran every once in a while. He certainly had the revolutionary Islamic credentials to get in and