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

read MY SON IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT YORKTOWN HIGH , I felt certain I was doing this for the last time. The crap about putting me on unpaid leave was just that: crap. You don’t read people out of compartmented clearances if you ever expect them back. Eventually, security would finish poking through my things and send them back to me, along with the money I’d put into retirement, and that would be it, a quarter-century, framed and out.
    The Cherokee flashed its lights once to let me know the light had turned green. I slipped the Norton into first and pulled slowly away. In the mirror, I could see my wingmen already turning around, their job over. They were probably wondering, like me, just what the hell I’d done.
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    I downshifted hard at the bottom of Route 123, leaned into Chain Bridge Road, and followed it across the Potomac into D.C. Twenty yards ahead of me, a dump truck was bouncing its way along the ripped-up roadbed. With each new rut, the truck threw off more junk. An empty five-gallon tin of Bertoli extra virgin olive oil bounced high in the air, arced maybe within a foot of my visor, fell left, and careened into the windshield of a Camry in the oncoming lane. There was no safe place under the sun. I slowed to a crawl, stuck my feet out to either side of the Norton, and threaded my way through the debris. Inches behind me, some fuckwit in a jet-black Humvee leaned on his horn.
    Washington’s weather had entered its sultry season. The morning had been sunny, even dry, almost a spring day. But now you could cut the humidity with a knife. A downpour was coming. I’d take a sandstorm any day.
    From Canal Road, I headed up Arizona. Across MacArthur Boulevard, I let the bike loose for three long blocks: a roar as beautiful as any jungle cat. I was fishtailing to a halt at the stop sign for Nebraska when a pair of fossils out for an early-evening constitutional gave me a cold stare as scary as anything I had seen that day. Off to my left was a mock Norman château—it had to hold at least eight bedrooms—bathed entirely in green lights: lights woven along the wrought-iron fence that fronted the property, lights strung along a half dozen trees that filled the long lawn up to the house, lights looping from the eaves and curling around the whimsical chimneys. Christmas in June. Too weird.
    American University was just taking shape in front of me when I veered off to the right and began working my way back over to Cathedral Avenue. I’d fallen in love for all of five days with a woman who lived in an apartment just off here—a magazine writer, an author of distinguished books. On the morning of the sixth day, she was still working on the same paragraph she’d been slaving over when we met. I was ready to move on to a new story line. Besides, I had to leave for Tashkent before the end of the month. Better to end it early. Chris Corsini was right: I do slink in and out of people’s lives.
    At the top of the hill, across Wisconsin Avenue, the cathedral shone in all its Gothic-Episcopal rectitude through what was fast becoming an evening mist. I’ve never been inside, I thought: something to do in retirement. If that’s what this is.
    The Norton Commando was the spoils of another dream gone sour. When our marriage finally fell apart, Marissa traded in our Istanbul apartment for a little stucco villa with its feet in the Adriatic, next to a lighthouse on a tiny Croatian island called Dugi Otok, a ninety-minute ferry ride out of Zadar. Rikki went off to Canterbury, in England, to middle school, just as her mother had done two decades before. And I got the bike, the only thing I kept. I’d always meant to ride it across Turkey into the Caucasus. Instead, this.
    I turned right at Massachusetts, right again on Wisconsin, and left on Garfield. At the bottom of Cleveland Avenue, I threaded my way through two cabs on to Calvert, then shot across Connecticut just as the light was