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

in Rangoon, and so far as I 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.
    â€œNot 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.
    â€œThe date time group in the lower-left corner,” I said. “It’s DEA’s. By the way, I didn’t catch your name.”
    â€œScott.”
    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. Judging 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 peeping out of my side suit pocket was
La Peste.
    â€œWho were you meeting there?” Scott asked.
    â€œWhere?” I was momentarily disoriented.
    â€œParis,” he said, with the tried patience of a road-show Job.
    â€œI can’t remember.” In fact, I couldn’t.
    â€œLet me see if I can help. José 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.
    â€œEver 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.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œWe 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