Blow the House Down by Robert Baer Read Free Book Online Page A

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?
    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.
    â€œMr. 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.
    â€œOn leave. A personal day. Visiting friends.”
    â€œWe 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 work. 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.
    â€œAfter?” I said, trying to sound genuinely lost.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œHold 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?”
    â€œMaggie, 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