Robert Baer - Blow the house down

The bar ahead of me refused to drop down to let me through. The one behind stopped me from backing out of the stall. I felt like a rodeo steer Waiting for someone to jump on my back and start kicking.

Meanwhile, I could feel the stir of wage slaves staring at the back of my head, amazed to find yet another idiot who had forgotten his pin code. How can it be, in a place like Washington? I was about to yell over at the security guard sitting behind the console when this intern in a miniskirt came sidling up to me with a smile that showed her braces.

"Are you Mr. Maxwell Waller?"

"Guilty."

The intern nodded at the security guard, who punched a button on his console, which lowered the bar behind me. When I had retreated sufficiently to make the point, the intern showed me into a room where you get photographed for your badge.

Forget goths and all those scowling indie-label bands with names that seem to have been dragged out of the devil's own handbook. These twenty-somethings waiting for their new badges were a wholesome, cheery lot! It didn't take me long to figure out they were a new career trainee class checking into headquarters for the first time. One guy who looked like an ex-college cheerleader was actually going around introducing himself as if he'd just pledged. An aubergine-skinned girl was telling her neighbor how she was going to put in for Hindi language training so she could reconnect with her roots. Even the most blase among them couldn't contain his/her excitement at being admitted to the inner sanctum of U.S. intelligence. Mind you, the grins would soon enough be wiped off their faces, but who needs an over-the-hill case officer just stiffed by a magnetic reader to tell

them that?

I wished I had a book. Or a newspaper. Or a Walkman. Or maybe even a not-too-old Sharper Image catalog. Instead, I wondered what the bureaucratic warlords who ran the place thought they were doing by making me cool my heels with these frat boys and girls. If they really thought this was going to crack me, how late to Planet CIA had their spaceship arrived? The incident isn't even classified. I'd been locked up two weeks in the basement of Lima's counterterrorism slammer with an unrepentant assassin from the Baader-Meinhof gang. By comparison, the only thing this crew might drive me to do was go floss.

One by one the room emptied. I was keeping company with vacant

seats when two suits appeared at the door: Armani knockoffs. Neither of their occupants could have been more than five-six. The knotted muscles underneath the pure Bangladesh Dacron weave suggested the two were security, and so they were. One came over and grimaced as if to apologize for having to walk me up the scaffold. Pleasantries, words of any sort, were out of the question. Silent as a parade of Trappist monks, we crossed the marbled grandeur of the lobby to the director's elevator, which ascends (just like the director himself) nonstop to the seventh floor.

After a brisk lock-step down the hall, my faux-Armani escort deposited me at 7B26, the conference room of the assistant deputy director for counterespionage. A welcoming party was gathered for my arrival, but with the morning sun on the other side of the window, I couldn't make out who was there.

Vince Webber was the first to swim out of the glare. He was sitting at the end of the conference table, examining the back of his hand, acting bored as only a Romanian pimp can. He hadn't changed a bit in all these years-pitted face, diamond Air Force Academy ring, gold neck chain gleaming through a diaphanous white shirt, gold Rolex watch.

Vince, I suppose, had a right to look bored: It was his conference room. After a stint at the NSC kissing ass and a blitzkrieg through half a dozen seventh-floor jobs, strewing bodies all over the place, Vince was now the assistant deputy director for counterespionage-the CIA's premier spy catcher. The director's brand-new Mr. Fixit. And believe me, after Rick Ames, counterespionage needed fixing. Putting a known loser, lush, and Political fruitcake in a position to betray all the Agency's Soviet assets happens only once (or twice, or thrice) in a lifetime.

Jack Rosetti, the lawyer for the Directorate of Operations, was stand-¦ng by the window, seemingly absorbed by the woods of northern Virginia as he jiggled the change in his pocket. Suspenders and a bow tie made Jack •ook at first glance like a Bond Street haberdasher, but he was far too tainted to waste his time in the trades. Jack was a bureaucratic survivor. He "ad fashioned a long and obit-friendly career precisely by avoiding controversy and scandal. Jack Rosetti left no fingerprints. Anywhere. And he certainly didn't want them on this little star chamber. My bet was he wanted

to fly right through that case-hardened, laser-microphone-resistant plate-glass window and over the trees.

Mary Beth Drew, ninety degrees to Vince Webber's right, had recently been named chief of security, but she had started her CIA life in the Directorate of Operations. We were in Rangoon together in 1988 when the junta crushed the democratic insurrection. Since then, she'd grown a double chin and cut her hair short in a pageboy. Now in her pressed black pants suit and crisp white oxford button-down shirt, she seemed to have settled quite nicely into the seventh floor. The slight flare of her nostrils told me that Mary Beth knew I was in the room, but she wouldn't break off leafing through her stack of traffic to have a look.

The other half dozen people around the conference table were strangers every one. No surprise. A whole new generation of PowerPoint and one-page-memo wizards had taken over the top floor in recent years. The average age was maybe thirty. They all lived in townhouses somewhere down 1-95 in Virginia, an hour-plus commute to Langley, in "planned communities" where the schools are good and crime means running a stop sign. They never went into D.C. for dinner because it was too dangerous. If they'd traveled at all, it was to London or Tel Aviv. The places I'd spent my life in they'd only seen in their nightmares.

Like Mary Beth Drew, Vince Webber pretended not to notice me until I walked right up to him. When he couldn't pretend any longer, he shot up and shook my hand as if I had just dropped out of the sky in front of his eyes. Vince motioned me over to the corner. Looking over at the rest of the assembly, he said in a whisper, "Max, sorry we're not meeting under happier circumstances."

Like Dubai, I thought.

I'd worked briefly for Webber when he was running Iranian ops out of Dubai, just long enough to figure out he didn't know shit about tradecraft. Shortly after I left, the Iranians rolled up all our networks except for one informant, an out-and-out fabricator whose bent and crooked tales were for Webber's ears only. A closed circle that yielded absolutely nothing. I think the reason Vince had never been able to stomach me in the years

since was that I knew the truth, but the new Vince Webber was way too polished to let old wounds fester in public.

"This will all work out, don't worry," he whispered as he put a reassuring hand on my shoulder and guided me to a chair.

I'd been assigned the oral-examinee seat, a touch lower and narrower than the others, set just off the far narrow end of the table where the rest of the conferees could contemplate me as if I were some rare and not particularly tasteful zoological specimen. Fair enough, I thought. That much they've got right.

There was a timid knock, a small stir. Whoever had come in late slid a chair up behind someone sitting halfway down the table, opposite the window. The newcomer refused to look my way, but I caught just enough glimpse as he took his seat to see that it was a guy I knew named Jim. Last name irrelevant. He'd been a security officer in Moscow back when I was working in the Fergana Valley. But what was he doing here? Now?