Robert Baer - Blow the house down

From his seat at the far, power end of the table, Webber nodded at a man sitting midships on the window side. He was wearing a pair of bifocals with thick plastic frames that you don't find at your local For Eyes anymore. The broken blood vessels in his cheeks and nose gave him a pink glow, offset by a green retiree's badge. Just to complete the effect, he had one of those small goatees you see on aging men who drive Miatas and cover their bald spots with Greek fishing caps.

"Mr. Waller," Bifocals started, "we'd like to know what you were doing in New York yesterday?" His voice reminded me of the Bea Arthur character in The Golden Girls, a show I'd seen too often on visits to my own golden-yeared aunt.

"On leave. A personal day. Visiting friends."

"We know that much. Please tell us what you did after you visited your friend."

Look confused, I told myself. Bifocals and I and everyone around the table knew the game: Never get chatty. You hand your interrogators a narrative on a silver platter and they'll pick it over at their leisure. Make them ^ork. They'll forget to ask you something or end up saying something they

hadn't intended to. It's as basic as not blowing your nose on the tablecloth at the Palm.

"After?" I said, trying to sound genuinely lost.

"You know what I mean." Bifocals was irritated and wanted me to know it. I took a guess that he, too, was from counterespionage. Like the Gestapo, they expected instant submission.

"I am talking about the evasive actions you took in New York, which we are interpreting as an effort to impede an investigation."

Rosetti reluctantly took his queue. "I just got off the telephone with the FBI's general counsel. They're hunkered down waiting for a suit from a Mr. Jamal."

"Hold on, Jack," I said, my turn to be irritated. "Are we wasting each other's time around this table because I dragged a surveillance team through Harlem? I'll confess, then: I did it. They were so inept I had to assume they were petty criminals. I deliberately ambushed them. It's S.O.P. Now, why don't you slap my hand or make me clap the erasers out the window, and we can all get back to work."

The astounding prismatic transformation of Bifocals' face-from pink to red to an almost 911-purple-filled in the first blank for me. The surveillance had belonged to counterespionage. No wonder Rick Ames practically had to pull his dick out and wave it in a circle in Lafayette Square before anyone would pay attention.

Mary Beth peered over her almond-shaped reading glasses at me long and hard before she finally broke the silence. "Dusting off some old Moscow tricks, are we, Maxwell? Pre-perestroika? The bad Russians?"

"Maggie, Maggie, it wasn't just Moscow. That's the way we did things in Beirut, Monrovia, Sarajevo, Kabul-we ran the bad guys into a meat grinder. You remember Rangoon, don't you? Contour flying? Adjust your tactics to the threat?"

Mary Beth glared at me, and with cause: I was not being my kindest. She had lasted less than two months in country-pulled out with a providential case of hepatitis B and dumped onto the admin track instead. She never could spot a tail during her short stay in Rangoon, and so far as 1 know, she never shipped overseas again. That was one point against me. The

other was nomenclature: She detested the nickname Maggie as much as she did case officers. God help us when she transferred back into the Directorate of Operations and took over some mega-station like New York or London.

I wasn't going to let the advantage go, though. I knew her well enough that if I provoked a little more, she would give up something. "New York isn't Moscow, Maggie. I'd assumed we were too civilized to follow each other around in our own country. And, small point maybe, but I don't think aping the KGB is going to make us better spies."

Mary Beth looked up at the ceiling, as if to say, See what I told you? There's nothing to be done with this cowboy.

Webber cleared his throat and nodded again at Bifocals, who responded by pushing a black-and-white glossy down the table my way: a grainy photograph of me walking into what had to be a Paris bistro, taken from maybe a hundred feet away.

"Not bad for DEA," I commented.

I'd had only a quick glance, but Bifocals' surprise told me I was right about the origin of the photo, too. He needed help.

"The date time group in the lower-left corner," I said. "It's DEA's. By Wie way, I didn't catch your name."

"Scott."

I couldn't remember what the bistro was called. There was a bird involved somehow, or maybe a fish. Maybe both: The Flying Carp? Some such. The point is, I used to go there a lot. It was off Rue Mabillon. Judg-'ng by what I was wearing, an old double-breasted suit and a frayed wool turtleneck that made me look like a down-and-out French intellectual, the picture must have been at least ten years old. I was in my light Camus disguise back then. Unless I was mistaken, the tattered paperback just barely Piping out of my side suit pocket was La Peste.

"Who were you meeting there?" Scott asked.

"Where?" I was momentarily disoriented.

"Paris," he said, with the tried patience of a road-show Job.

"I can't remember." In fact, I couldn't.

"Let me see if I can help. Jose Marco Cabrillo was having lunch there [that day."

That I hadn't expected. I'd never met Cabrillo, of course, never broken bread with him, never clinked Pernods, but I knew him by reputation-a vicious Nicaraguan drug dealer. He'd been assassinated in Batumi, Georgia, a year earlier.

"Ever worked France before?" I said. My irritation was starting to edge toward anger, a bad idea. "Any of you?" I nodded in apology to Webber: He knew that I knew that he had. "On any given day there are thousands of narcos, arms dealers, and pimps lunching in Paris. Lunch is what people do in Paris, and they pay for it by selling drugs, Kalashnikovs, and hookers. The French don't give a damn as long as they're not clipping the locals or cutting too deep into their baksheesh. If you're right about Cabrillo and me in the same restaurant on the same day, it's a coincidence."

I waited for Scott to continue. There had to be more.

"We don't think it's a coincidence," he said. "We have in our possession evidence that you subsequently received payments from the Cabrillo family."

The idea, I assumed, was to throw me off balance. Why else come up with this nonsense? But I wasn't going to give them the satisfaction. Instead, I put on my best you're-all-idiots face.

"We have established a correlation between TDYs you made to Geneva in 1991 and transfers made to a foreign account by a member of the Cabrillo family. Four visits, four transfers. A nice match, wouldn't you say?"

It was unadulterated crap. No one from the Cabrillo family had ever sent me a penny. Nor do I own, manage, or have access to the proceeds of a secret foreign account. Sure, I oversaw a lot of clandestine accounts, but they belonged to the Agency. And the money always went out. It never came back the other way.

"Let me see the statements. The only bank account I have is at Riggs i*1 Georgetown."

Scott looked over at Webber, who nodded again. That's when it occurred to me: They were taping this-audio, not video. Bifocals would have the starring role. Webber might never have been in the room at all.

"The money was wired from Geneva to what we believe is a life-raft

account in Nauru, a numbered account," Scott said with his best Dragnet menace. "We're verifying it's yours. We will, though."

I think it must have been the "though" that finally pissed me off enough to draw me out from cover. There was something so officious about it, so unctuous, so dead certain that I wanted to shove my fingers up Scott's nostrils, hoist him out of his chair, and snap his neck.

"This has got to be a joke," I said, trying to calm down. "Listen to yourselves: You're telling me that you've pulled my badge, one, because of trips I made to Geneva that just happened to coincide with transfers to an account you're not sure who owns and, two, because I ate lunch in the same restaurant at the same time as a now-dead narcotics dealer."