Blow the House Down (28 page)

CHAPTER 48

A
 
QUEUE OF CABS WAITED OUT IN FRONT
of the Four Seasons. I climbed in the first one, gave the driver the address of the Amble Inn, and sat back while he hit the lock switch.

We rode in silence until we passed through the blinking stoplight at 18th and Rhode Island Avenue and I saw the swirl of red, white, and blue lights from the two D.C. fire trucks pulled up in front of the inn. Smoke poured from my bathroom window. A ladder stood propped against the wall, a fire hose snaking up beside it.

I could see it all unfolding in my mind's eye: the lock popped out in the hall or the hasp just ripped off the jamb, the room tumbled, finally a gloved hand (no prints) flicks on the bathroom light and opens the door just as the bulb explodes and burning embers tumble into the little pool of gas in the sink below. Was the gloved hand surprised? I wondered. Did it try to grab the envelope off the Gideon Bible in that fraction of a second before it realized its flesh would melt if it tried? Did it have any idea the paper inside was blank? No, it would have happened too fast. I still had surprise on my side.

But the point was, only two people knew where I was staying, India and Willie, and between them, it was no choice at all.

“Change of plans,” I told the driver. “Tuttle Place.”

CHAPTER 49

T
HE LIGHTS AT 2501
T
UTTLE
P
LACE
were all on, blazing. Frank was entertaining. I walked past the house and turned down the side street, along the brick wall that surrounded the garden. You couldn't see it from the street, but I knew on the other side was the swimming pool, beyond the flagstone patio with the frolicking Henry Moore bronze. It was where Frank liked to eat when the weather was good. I could hear music coming from the patio. Patsy Cline.

I pushed through the rosebushes that ran against the wall, found a chipped brick for a foothold, and hoisted myself up until I could throw a leg over the wall. The closed-circuit camera was staring right at me, the red light blinking. I was counting on no one monitoring it. Everyone would be helping with dinner. They could watch the tape the next morning, after it was too late.

I paused on top of the wall to listen. Someone was telling a joke—a male voice I didn't recognize. A woman laughed. India.

The music was too loud for anyone to hear me drop down onto the other side of the wall into the azalea bushes. I paused again to listen. The granite pool gave off a muted, shimmering light. I could smell citronella torches.

I stepped out of the azaleas and heard a sound you can never mistake: the chambering of a shotgun shell.

“I wouldn't go any further.”

I half turned to see Frank sitting in a wrought-iron pool chair with a short-barreled twelve-gauge riot gun across his knees. Going by what he was wearing—a black cashmere blazer, chinos, and a bow tie—I'd interrupted dinner. Someone had been monitoring the cameras after all.

“Don't you think you've gotten yourself in enough trouble without breaking and entering? If I cut you in half, the FBI would throw a party.”

“I'm sure.” I made one small step back, edging toward the wall.

“Far enough.” I heard the safety click on and off. “Why don't you take a load off your feet, Max. Sorry there's no chair. Sit on the edge of the pool. The light's better.”

Frank raised the riot gun at my head.

I went over and sat down on the edge of the pool. The underwater lights were enough to light me but not Frank. I couldn't see him now.

“You know, I thought you were a lot smarter,” Frank said.

“Me, too. I misread you by a mile.”

“Did you?” he snorted.

“Was this place worth it, the pool, the Modigliani?” I said.

“What did you find in Michelle's safe?”

I heard laughter from the patio, this time loud: India's voice again, then a man laughing at what she'd said. I wondered if she knew I was sitting there. Odds were she did.

“I asked what you found in Geneva.”

“Enough to nail you.”

“Have you been through the papers you stole?”

“Not yet. I will, though. They're perfectly safe.”

“Any fool would keep it in a safe place. But frankly, you've been sloppy, Max. For a start, I can't believe you never wondered about the coincidence of that Nicaraguan wiring money to the Nauru account every time you happened to show up in Geneva. Did you ask Webber to see the transfers? Just to put your mind at rest: There
were
transfers. Each time you came to Geneva, I managed to paper it with a fake transfer from Cabrillo's account to Nauru.”

I was starting to lose my footing. Right now Frank should have been on the phone to the FBI to come get me, not confessing how he'd framed me.

“Cute,” I said. “But I was never on Cabrillo's payroll. It was a dumb ploy.”

“They served my purposes; they were enough for Webber to pry you out of the place.”

Shit. He's going to shoot me, I thought. Why else the confession?

I tried swallowing, but my mouth felt like it had been swabbed with cotton. Frank would say it was self-defense. Not even a manslaughter charge. I looked at the water glimmering at my side and wondered if I could roll into it without getting shot, swim to the bottom of the pool, and then I don't know what. Lie there until I drowned? Never mind, I'd be dead before I hit the water.

“It was easy.”

“What?”

“Framing you. Michelle knew Cabrillo's banker, who for a consideration ginned up the fake transfers. No money got sent anywhere, but it was good enough for DEA to call Webber.”

I looked at Frank, still wondering why he was telling me all this. Wasting words, gloating over having beat me—this wasn't his style.

He started to laugh as if he was really enjoying himself. He stood up, keeping the riot gun on me, and moved his chair closer to where I was sitting. He was in the light of the pool now.

“Maxie, we haven't been at a cotillion dance all these years.”

Frank flipped the safety back on and put the riot gun down at his side against the chair.

“Max, don't you see? The photo, Millis's brains on the wall of the Breezeway Motel, my imminent fall, India's trip out to Lebanon—you fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.”

“What are you talking about?” I stammered.

“The photo you carried around the world, obsessively believing it was the key to Buckley's murder. Ever wonder how you got it?”

“I dug it out of Archives.”

“Did you ever see the 201 file that went with it?”

“Lost.”

“Wrong. The 201 never existed. That was mistake two. You never checked around to confirm if it was a real 201. You wanted it to be Murtaza Ali Mousavi's picture so bad, you never confirmed anything. All you cared about was moving an inch closer to your grail. You wore it on your sleeve.”

“What are you saying?”

“It was me who found the photo and cut out the head. I had someone fiddle with the records and insert the photo into the system for you to find. Bait.”

“I don't believe it.”

“Wait a second,” he said. He left the shotgun resting on the chair. He had more trust in me than I had in him.

Frank was back in five minutes. He handed me the Peshawar photo, but here the headless man in the salwar chemise had a face—Oliver Wendell Channing's.

Frank had sat back down. He was smiling, no doubt amused by my confusion.

“Why?”

“Because the only way to stop Channing was from the outside.”

The shock of what Frank was saying must have drained the blood from my face, but suddenly it fell into place. I'd been manipulated, lied to, seduced, betrayed, and set up—the same thing I'd done day to day for the last twenty-five years.

CHAPTER 50

I
 
WAS TRYING TO PUT IT ALL TOGETHER
in my head when Frank put his hand on my shoulder. “Let's have a drink.”

We moved to the table next to the Henry Moore, and Simon brought us a pair of Bas Armagnacs.

“Let me tell you how it happened from the beginning.”

In late 2000, Frank was in Islamabad bidding on a natural gas pipeline when he ran into an old informant who'd fought in the Afghan war. After dinner, the informant pulled out a box of old photos. They were pretty much all the same, mostly mouj posing with AK-47's, except the one: Oliver Wendell Channing posing with Osama bin Laden and three others.

“Christ, we all knew Oliver was a loose canon,” Frank said. “Worse than you. He never reported nine-tenths of the people he met. He spent his vacations in the back of beyond, in places we weren't supposed to go to. By the end he was completely out of control. I wasn't all that surprised to see him in a picture with bin Laden.”

A week after Frank got back from Islamabad, he ran into Millis at a dinner on the Hill. The two hadn't seen much of each other in years, but they had Peshawar in common, so Frank told Millis about the photo. When he was through, Millis spun Frank around and pushed him out of earshot of everyone. The National Security Agency, Millis said, had just intercepted a call from David Channing, Oliver's son, to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who by then had an arrest warrant on him. There wasn't anything substantive in the intercept, but it was clear David Channing hadn't called a wrong number.

Curious, Millis went out to Langley to ask about David Channing. No one wanted to touch it. David Channing was too big a political player in Washington to go after lightly. Also, it was an election year, and Channing was showering money on the neocons. If they got the White House, whoever had crossed Channing was sure to pay. The seventh floor had no intention of sticking its nose in
that
manure heap.

Millis was savvy enough to know he couldn't go after Channing based on one call to KSM. He was about to let it drop, write it off as a coincidence, but then one afternoon a CIA analyst knocked on his door with a story to tell. In 1996, after the Manila police rolled up KSM's networks, the analyst did a profile on options purchased around the time the planes were supposed to go down. It was just a hunch, but he came across a cluster of trades going short on the airline stocks, betting their stock would fall. The analyst couldn't decide whether it was one person buying the puts or it was all just a coincidence. They'd been made through dozens of traders, enciphered accounts, layered transactions, and complicated swaps. He enlisted the National Security Agency to see if they could reconstruct the calls to and from the traders, intersecting them with the purchases of puts. It wasn't easy. The buy orders came in on different phones, from all around the world, but there was one thing that got his attention: a phone number in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Right after KSM's accomplices were arrested in Manila, someone calling from the Maine number contacted a trader, who immediately canceled some airline put options. The analyst reverse-traced the number to BT Trading, and followed BT Trading to David Channing. That's as far as he'd gotten. He knew he'd walked into a mine field. Without backup, he wasn't going to go any further. When he heard about Millis's nosing around headquarters asking questions about Channing, he decided on his own to go see Millis.

“Why didn't Millis and the analyst take it to the FBI?” I asked.

“You'd have to see the stuff,” Frank said. “It was too dense and complicated to open a criminal case. Instead, Millis decided to enlist me. I was on the outside. I didn't have to file reports. I traveled in that world, options trading.”

Frank dug around and found out that Michelle Zwanzig was Channing's Swiss fiduciary. To get a foot in her door, Frank opened an account with her. Not that it did any good. She never talked about Channing's business. The only thing Frank was able to do was get the layout of her office and a look at the outside of her safe.

“So that's where the key thing came in,” I said. “The McGuffin to encourage me to break into Michelle's office and make sure I invited India to Geneva.”

Frank smiled.

I wondered for a moment if Frank had been listening on another line when India and I had talked. If so, he must have worked hard to keep from laughing, but Frank was already back on Channing.

He said he'd thought about presenting the evidence to the seventh floor himself, but he would have gotten the same reception Millis got: blind fear of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue once the election was settled. Neocons are nothing if not vindictive.

“Besides, the evidence was still too flimsy, and there's no way an inside investigation could have been hidden from Webber,” Frank said.

“You knew about Webber that long ago?”

“Everybody knew he was angling for a job with Channing. That's the only reason Applied Science got a contract with the Agency.”

“I knew it,” I interrupted again. “It was Webber who shit-canned the stuff from Kuwait, the SIM chips and the interrogation of the two Saudis they arrested. ‘Not credible.' I can see him brushing it off his desk with a flip of his hand.”

“You're wrong about one thing, though,” Frank said, stopping me. “Webber doesn't know about Channing and KSM's plans. He's really just the cleanup crew. Once Millis and I decided that the seventh floor wasn't going to act, we read three people into this. Maggie was one of them; the other two you won't ever need to know. We knew the investigation had to be done from the outside—you.”

It only now occurred to me that I'd been outsourced, put on the same level as Applied Science and the thousands of Agency retirees working on the Dulles Corridor. Only I was never given the choice.

Frank must have seen my look. “Max, what would you have done?”

“You had no idea I'd pick up the thread, find my way to Nabil and the prince. Without them I would never have ID'ed Oliver Channing in the picture.”

He answered me with a question: “After O'Neill told you the photo was found in Millis's motel room, would you have acted otherwise?”

“But it wasn't found there, was it?”

“No, we got someone in the FBI to pass on the lie to O'Neill.”

“How did Millis die? I can't believe he was murdered.”

“Maybe he wasn't. But the stuff about his brains not being where they were supposed to be—more bullshit we fed O'Neill.”

“You set up O'Neill, too?”

“I knew you'd run to O'Neill after you were shoved out the door. We needed him to tell you about the surveillance and make you believe Millis had his brains sucked out. You trust O'Neill.”

“I need to know: Was it you who arranged to have O'Neill's briefcase stolen, forcing him out?”

“I don't know anything about the briefcase. What I do know is that Channing is behind the current investigation into O'Neill. He found out about your meeting O'Neill the day you left for France. Channing needs him discredited.”

“Back to how Millis died.”

“We don't know, and we probably never will know,” Frank said.

“Of all the case officers you could have picked, why me?”

“Your obsession with Buckley and Mousavi. Your obsessions are what drive you.”

“Oh, come on, Frank. You couldn't be sure of that. I could have just picked up and disappeared. It was a crazy gamble, thinking I'd pick up all the clues you left and follow them.”

“I know about Baluchistan. Betrayal and abandonment. It's something you can never let go of. After you got to Europe, I made you believe I'd betrayed you. Not answering your phone calls was the start. As the clues of my betrayal mounted, I knew you would come after me but in the end find Channing. I was the bait.”

“Webber's visit to you with Lawson—it never happened, did it?”

Frank shook his head no.

“India was in on it from the beginning. She never went to work for Webber, did she?”

“Another piece of disinformation we slipped to O'Neill. Like I said, you work best when things get personal.”

“But using India as bait? That was cynical.”

“It wasn't supposed to happen,” Frank shot back. “I blame myself for that. If it's any consolation, I was madder at myself than you when I burst into your room at the Beau Rivage.”

I thought about how Frank must have run her into me on the Syrian-Lebanese border and in Geneva, feeding her a script.

“You offered her up on a platter,” I said, more to myself than to Frank. I hoped my life never came to the point that I ever sacrificed Rikki like that.

“Where's Rikki these days? Mind the glass houses, Max.”

“And India carried it off beautifully, right to the end,” I said, ignoring him. “She even tipped off Applied Science where I was staying.”

“That wasn't her. Maybe not even Applied Science.”

“Who, then?”

“We don't know. Someone. It doesn't matter. They want the documents.”

“Who else besides Channing is in on this?”

“We don't know that, either. David Channing definitely has a following in the White House. I have no idea who knows what.”

“They want to invade the Middle East, don't they?”

“They're only missing a pretext. Channing's well enough plugged in to know that if bin Laden and KSM run some planes, let's say, into Saudi Arabia's oil facilities, this president seizes them. But the point for Channing is that oil goes through the ceiling, and he makes a killing.”

“What about Iran's role?”

“Another unknown.”

“Is Mousavi dead?”

“There are two choices: Mousavi is alive and working with KSM. Or Mousavi is dead and someone picked up the torch for him. Let it go.”

“One more question: Mousavi—did Oliver Channing recruit him?”

“Yes and no. We think he cultivated Mousavi when he was a student in Beirut. He helped Mousavi get a visa to UCLA.”

“Why's there no record of a visa?”

“There was. David Channing just saw that it got scrubbed clean, or almost all of it.”

“Oliver didn't have anything to do with Buckley's—”

“Unlikely. The guy was a harmless romantic.”

I was about to ask if Frank thought David Channing had ever met Mousavi, but Frank was right. This wasn't about history.

“Where's India now?”

“She's gone off with a friend. The young. Late-night rambles.”

“A friend?”

He left it at that.

“So what's the next move?” I asked.

“The ball's in your court, my friend. Let's hope you don't hit it back into the net.”

“If you'd told me…”

“I'll take the blame for that. Just go get the paper and come back with it.”

He stood up with me, threw an arm over my shoulder, and led me up the terrace steps and through the house. Half an hour earlier, I had been certain I was going to die at his poolside.

“I'll make sure you get Maggie's hearing tomorrow—a real one. No setup. No Sherley. No Webber.”