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

seemed to be reading off some mental index card he’d memorized in Security 101.
    I sifted silently through the boxes: a hash pipe from Yemen, the Baluch prayer rug I’d been dragging around the world ever since my sainted mother had left me there, all the other cheap souvenirs you pick up overseas and put around your office to create the illusion that your Washington servitude is only temporary. At the bottom was a framed photo of my daughter, mugging it up with an Auguste Rodin sculpture in the garden at the Hirshhorn. I’d taken it during her two-week visit the summer before, the best time together I think we’d ever had. Rikki was a teenager now, funny, ironic like her mother. I had no idea what had happened to the sullen little girl with braces all over her teeth, but she was gone, magically replaced. At night—Rikki in my bed, I on the sofa—we’d chatter like schoolgirls before falling asleep. I’d never done that with anyone. It was like a half-month-long pajama party.
    â€œIt’s not all here,” I said, getting back to my feet. “I had a couple things in my safe. Mind if I look?”
    They whispered to each other, seemed about to call for permission, then must have figured, Oh, what the hell.
    â€œOkay,” one of them said, “but make it quick.”
    I went right to the bottom drawer, at the back, where I’d kept the spiral notebooks and my files on Buckley and Mousavi. Gone. Everything else was there except them. Webber was probably looking at them at that very minute, searching for the phantom connection to the phantom narcotics network.
    â€œI must have made a mistake,” I said as I stood up.
    The other Armani had produced a clipboard from somewhere, a form for me to sign, acknowledging that I had done whatever I had just done. The pen was chained to the board, I suppose so I wouldn’t be tempted to steal it as my last criminal act inside the place.
    The final station of the cross was waiting back at headquarters. I had to be “read out” of the clearances I’d been “read into” over the years—Special Compartmented Intelligence, a nuclear Q Clearance, Talent-Keyhole, one or two others. I’d even forgotten I still had a Q Clearance, but never mind. The industrial-strength matron in charge of last rites dutifully ran through the criminal penalties for talking about this stuff to the unwashed, but I didn’t need to hear it. Everyone knew that if you crossed any of the bright red lines laid out in the 1947 National Security Act, you’d win yourself a one-way ticket to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, all expenses paid, and spend the rest of your life on a concrete bed in a 7'1"-by-12'1" cell.
    â€œAnd by the way, Max, we’re sorry to see you go.”
    I could no longer remember her name, but a few months earlier I’d wandered into an office party celebrating the birth of her second grandchild. The kid’s photograph had been stuck on the end of a toothpick and pinned on top of the cake. Grandma cut me a slice herself. Maybe she really was sorry to see me go. But who knew in this insane asylum.
    Out in the parking lot, the Armanis kept to the safety and comfort of their air-conditioned Cherokee as I climbed onto the worn seat of my vintage Norton Commando and prayed to all gods known and unknown that it would start. I had a vision that I would have to push the damn bike halfway across the parking lot to jump it—a spark plug needed replacing, or maybe it was the points. What I knew about fixing motorcycles I had picked up in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
three decades back. Thank God for small favors, the Norton turned over on the first kick: the last bit of dignity I had left to me.
    I could hear the Cherokee thrumming behind me as I passed under the sally port and pulled up to the stoplight at Route 123. Waiting there behind a Dodge Grand Caravan with a bumper sticker that