Blow the House Down (25 page)

CHAPTER 40

New York City

O
'N
EILL WAS AS GOOD
as his word. An FBI agent was waiting for us at immigrations. You couldn't miss him. The loose linen jacket didn't even pretend to hide the Glock and shoulder holster. With only a hello, he walked India and me through immigrations, customs, and out of the terminal to catch a taxi.

Both of us were exhausted. India had cried halfway across the Atlantic, until there was nothing left inside her. A death in the family, I told the stewardess when she asked. Wasn't that right?

India fell asleep in the taxi heading into the city. I woke her when we got to the Mercer, walked her inside to the lobby, and told her I'd be back for her in a couple hours. She didn't protest, didn't say anything. She must have done something like this a hundred times with her father, wait for him to make a meeting, never asking who or why.

I looked at the address twice, 9 Pell Street, and again at the number above Joe Shanghai's, a downscale Chinese restaurant in the downscale part of Chinatown. O'Neill had sent word with his FBI baby-sitter that I was to ask for him at the “receptionist.” Easier said than done. I pushed my way through the noon crowd waiting to get in and waved my hand back and forth to get the attention of the young Chinese girl behind the register.

“I'm here to join Keith.” It was the name I'd been told to ask for. She looked at me dumbly. I figured she didn't speak a word of English.

“Keith!” I yelled. “Here?”

“Keith? Upstairs. Sixth floor.” A flawless Brooklyn accent.

I hit the steps. A lawyer's office took up the entire second floor. Above that, the building was all apartments. The place was eerily quiet after the hubbub down below. I got to the fifth floor and that was it. No sixth, but there were stairs to the roof and the door wasn't locked, so I opened it and walked out. O'Neill grabbed my shoulder from behind.

“Three buildings that way,” he said, pointing across the roofs.

I heard him slap a padlock on the door I'd just come through. No one could get out on the roof now unless he'd brought along an axe or a sledge hammer.

Three buildings down, just as advertised, we clambered back inside. Again, O'Neill locked the door behind us, then led me to a third-floor apartment. The place was bare except for a table in the living room with four chairs around it. I looked in the kitchen. The refrigerator door was open. Cabinet doors were open and empty, too. The whole place reeked.

“What are we doing here?” I asked.

“NYPD,” O'Neill said, sitting down at the table. “I still have friends there.”

“That wasn't an answer.”

“Somebody's all over me,” he said.

“Like?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“You sound like me. You'll tell me if you want. Did you get the meeting set up?”

He nodded. A surprise. I thought I'd run that well dry, too.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“We'll go down together.”

“I'm not going.”

“Don't tell me you got something more important to do.”

“July eighth was my KMA.”

“KMA?”

“Kiss-my-ass day. Twenty-five years in the Bureau. And I took it. I retired August twenty-second.”

“What the hell do you mean? You were in Beirut just—”

“On my own hook.”

“All the bitching about the embassy?”

“It's called creative reality, Max. I paid for the fucking bodyguards, too.”

“I don't get it. Why?”

“Because someone had to tell you face-to-face, you stupid CIA fuck, that your ass was in the wringer.”

“You flew to Beirut on your own dime just to do that?” I still didn't get it. I was sure O'Neill had a heart, but it wasn't of gold.

“Maybe I started to believe you, too. I told you, you're making me as crazy as you are. And goddammit, if you have to know the truth, bin Laden's going to hit us. Out or in, I'll never let it drop.”

“Wait a minute. My immunity, how did you—”

“
I
left, Max. My friends didn't. I've got a few favors I can call in.”

This was a showstopper. O'Neill was the one guy I'd really walked through this stuff—months of explanation, of cajoling and convincing, down the drain.

“Don't sweat it. You have the paper. You'll do just fine.”

He pushed a stuffed manila envelope across the bare tabletop. I could make out the outline of one of those plastic CD cases on top.

“Your e-mail. Too bad I never got past the lobby at the Albergo. Those photos make the place look almost civilized. I take it the docs are there.”

“No one's going to understand this stuff on its own. I need a live body to back me up.”

“You want the truth? I was forced out. They don't want me there, no matter what I have to say. I'm not invited to this game.”

The wheels had started to come off the previous summer, O'Neill said, when his briefcase was stolen at a retirement seminar in Orlando—“from the goddamned conference room with a dozen agents sitting around. That was one hell of a miraculously lucky thief. Amazingly, the fucking thing popped up a few hours later with nothing gone.”

“Why didn't you tell me when I saw you in Beirut?”

“I was still getting used to the idea. Things got really strange after I started asking around about your two Saudis in San Diego.”

“Strange?”

“Yeah, strange. Webber went apeshit, denied everything, went straight to the acting director, complaining that I was spying on the Agency.”

“What did he say?”

“I don't know. I never talked to him about it, but just about then someone at the Bureau gave my file to the
New York Times.
There were…irregularities.”

“You could have fought it. Told the truth.”

“Fuck you and the truth, Waller. But if you got to have it again, there was a money problem. Nothing big. Just big enough.”

O'Neill always insisted on paying when I came up to New York. I'd always assumed those doubles at Elaine's were going on the Bureau's tab. Maybe not.

“The perfect tempest in a teapot,” O'Neill sighed. “The fuckheads won't stop chewing on it. I thought I heard some kind of echo on my phone this morning.”

“John, the only time you can hear a tap on your phone is when the Bangladeshis are doing it.”

I'm sure it was my imagination, but O'Neill looked smaller.

“You'll love this,” he said. “Less than twelve hours after I packed my stuff out, the Agency finally cabled us about the two Saudis.”

“How'd you find out?”

“One of the guys looking for them told me.”

“Looking? You mean they're missing?”

“Yep, as of 0900 this morning neither the FBI nor the CIA has any idea where they are. Hard to believe. The day after I walk out the door, that pack of bastards you used to work for tells us. You can't make this shit up.”

“What about the Applied Science surveillance?”

“No clue. Oh, by the way, I was thinking about you. The week before I left, they arrested some dirtbag out in Minneapolis—a Mr. Moussaoui. He was taking flight training. I actually called up and asked if he had blue eyes and red hair. You know, Max, you really are like catching the clap.”

“Well?”

“No. He's French-Algerian. Not a French-speaking Iranian.”

“Back to basics: Who's going to be at the D.C. meeting tomorrow?”

“The guy for the Bureau is Chuck Appleton. Not the sharpest tool in the shed. The Bureau's line is that with you and me pushing this penny, they don't want to put any credence in it. DOJ is sending someone from Violent Crimes and Terrorism. He won't say a word, just listen. I don't know who the Agency's sending. But count on it, he won't be a friendly. Oh, and there'll be this politico from the National Security Council—Don Sherley. He'll be chairing the meeting. It's his first week on the job, maybe his first day.”

“Don Sherley? What the fuck.”

O'Neill rolled his eyes, seemingly as amazed as I was.

I couldn't believe the guy was back in play. Truth told, I'd thought he'd lost his security clearance for good. He'd been around in the Reagan years, a deputy assistant secretary of defense. Every time he flew to Tel Aviv, Sherley downloaded top secret cables onto his laptop, and each time, Mossad got into the laptop and copied everything. The Bureau thought he'd done it on purpose, but since he never handed any secrets over directly, they couldn't make a case.

Sherley had disappeared for a few years at the start of the first Clinton term only to surface again at the helm of a right-wing think tank called the Washington Institute for a Fair Peace in the Middle East. The institute was known for pushing wacky ideas like Arab nationalism equals fascism and democracy was going to bring down the Silk Curtain just like it brought down the Iron Curtain. No one paid it any attention until the blowhard op-ed columnists at the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
picked up the refrain. And until the new administration moved into the White House. The institute's latest hobbyhorse was invading Iraq, turning it over to the Shia, then spreading a Shia revolution down the Arab side of the Gulf.

O'Neill was reading my mind.

“You know who funds the institute, don't you?”

I didn't.

“David Channing. His father gave the seed money. Sonny boy picked it up.”

“Oh, fuck.”

They'd more than stacked the decks; they'd dealt themselves all aces. If Sherley was chairing the meeting, he'd be sure to shit on everything I brought to the table.

“I ain't going,” I said. “It's an ambush.”

“You got one chance. You have to.”

He was right. I knew that. But I sure as hell wasn't going to deliver the prince's intercepts and the Geneva stuff to Sherley. I might as well burn them right now. I handed O'Neill back the package he'd brought with him, along with the plastic shopping bag of documents from Geneva that I'd been thumbing through on the plane while India sobbed beside me.

“These are better off with you than me,” I explained. “In New York, they just mug you for money.”

O'Neill shrugged.

“Wait a minute.” There was one Geneva document I wanted to keep with me. I fished it out, then gave him the bag again.

“You know what you're doing?” he asked.

I thought I did, maybe for the first time in a long while. But I'd been wrong before.

“They'll be in my safe, thirty-fourth floor. Even my new secretary doesn't have the combination.”

“Wait a minute. What thirty-fourth floor? What new secretary? I thought you were out on the street.”

“Me? C'mon. Security chief, World Trade Center. I started this week. Expense account as long as my arm.”

O'Neill smiled as he said it, but he seemed to be trying to decide something, waging some private battle with himself. I couldn't tell if he lost or won.

“Listen. I got an idea,” I said. O'Neill was starting to shift in his chair, ready to leave. “A channel check. When you get back to the office, call the Chatworth Galleries on Sixty-eighth—”

“That thief's not out of business?”

“Tell him you've got a package to drop by.”

“What? I'm selling my Ming vases?”

“Just do it.”

“Not until you tell me what for.”

“You think your phone's tapped. Let's see.”

He grunted, shifted again, then decided to say whatever was on his mind.

“Max, the guy who met you at the airport told me you're traveling with someone. Your daughter, he said.”

“Ex-colleague.”

“I know who she is. Be careful.”

“Come on, John. She's an old friend. I've known her since she was a kid.”

“Did she tell you that she started two weeks ago in the Counter-Espionage Center, working for Webber? I think he's the guy who framed you.”

O'Neill went down the stairs with me. I watched him as he walked up Pell. His Buick Regal was parked in front of a fire hydrant.

CHAPTER 41

Washington, D.C.

A
T
W
ASHINGTON
N
ATIONAL,
I started to take India's hand as we were walking down the long corridor to the terminal, then decided it wasn't even worth pretending. I don't know if she sensed what I'd learned while she was sipping tea at the Mercer, but she smiled so hard, I thought she might start crying again.

“I'll call,” I said when we got to the moving ramp over by the Metro stop. I took her hand after all. Maybe O'Neill had the story wrong. Maybe I wanted to touch her one last time.

“Can't you tell me where you're staying?” she asked.

I paused, then told her. She'd never heard of the place, but the address didn't impress her.

“You'll be okay with those?” She was staring at my carry-on, thinking the documents must still be inside. “I'll hold them for you if you want.”

“No,” I said. “Thanks, but you never know when—” There was no need to finish, nor any way to.

India nodded, turned, and started down the ramp. She wasn't my mother, though. She turned, waved a big good-bye, even blew me a kiss. I waited until she was out of sight, then found a pay phone and called Willie.

“Ever hear of this whorehouse on Rhode Island Avenue?”