Read Online Blow the House Down by Robert Baer - Free Book Online

going to come to the same conclusions. You know that. They’re gonna lose interest, drop the case. I’m going to ride this one, make sure it happens as fast as possible. Just don’t go stepping on any more toes, especially Mary Beth’s.”
    Did Webber really think he was going to sweet-talk me out the front door, make me go away and die without a fight?
    Webber suddenly pulled his head back with his shark’s grin and nudged me in the ribs.
    â€œHey, Maggie sounds like a spurned woman. Anything you want to tell me?”
    â€œHow do I get in touch with you?” I asked, ignoring him. “Give me your cell number.”
    Webber looked at me for a beat, no doubt wondering what I was up to.
    â€œYou know, for an update. Sudden revelations. No crank calls. Promise.”
    Webber paused for another beat and then pulled out a yellow sticky pad, wrote down a number, and handed it to me.
    â€œ
No
one has it,” he assured me. “Call me in two weeks and I’m sure I’ll have something for you.”
    â€œDo you ever wonder what happened to them, Vince?” I asked as I stuffed the paper in my wallet.
    â€œThem?”
    â€œThe compromised networks in Iran.”
    â€œDead, I suppose.” He sounded as he if were talking about fish bait. “It’s a nasty business, Max.”
    â€œBut we don’t have to make it so easy for them.”
    The shark’s grin never left Webber’s face as he crooked his manicured finger and summoned the faux-Armanis from down the hall to come collect me.
    It was only then, as I walked away, that I realized I had been wrong about the matrices. I was being framed, plain and simple. No one was connecting dots; they were spitting them out like rivets to make a case against me. That’s what the circus in New York had been about: goad me, see where I ran, work it all into the story line. Smart as hell, really.

CHAPTER 6
    T HE POLYGRAPH WAS THE PAS DE DEUX I knew it would be, with me doing the heavy lifting. Assured I was guilty as charged, the operator tweaked his settings accordingly. Just as I had been trained by some of our same in-house necromancers, I declined to react to any of the dozen or so questions posed, and so the stylus did nothing, a flat line. (Strangely, or perhaps not, my Beirut spiral notebooks never came up. What better time to raise the subject than when I was wired to a chair?) By any objective standard, our session finished in a draw, but Langley follows low-rent Vegas rules: In the event of a toss-up, house wins. In my now-fat security file, the results would be entered as “inconclusive.” Unofficially, “inconclusive” nicely cemented my new pariah status.
    Afterward, the Armani twins sped me out in an unmarked Jeep Cherokee to my little off-campus office park near Tysons Corner. The door to my office was yellow-taped: Do not cross. Crime scene. No one was inside, but I could see from the mess that they’d left nothing untouched. The safe drawers were pulled open, the files stacked on the floor, next to three reinforced cardboard moving boxes, all ready to be carted off somewhere: forensics, counterintelligence, the seventh floor. Maybe to the
Washington Post
for all I knew.
    The Armanis were doing wing duty for me: one by either arm. I could see them taking my measure, probably wishing they could handcuff me. Behind them, the twenty or so annuitants who worked under me had formed two lines, a cordon for my perp walk. Their cardigans and pipe-stained teeth, eerily dated bouffants and comfortable footwear gave the scene an almost comic element, as if Mr. Rogers had been a spy all along. I’d spent a year shepherding this herd of broken pensioners, making sure their contracts got renewed so they could pay for their prescription medicines. Now not one of them would make eye contact with me.
    â€œWe will need you to inventory your personal effects,” the Armani on my right said. He