Blow the House Down by Robert Baer Read Free Book Online

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 standing 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 look at first glance like a Bond Street haberdasher, but he was far too talented to waste his time in the trades. Jack was a bureaucratic survivor. He had 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 I-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.
    â€œThis 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