Blow the House Down (6 page)

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.

“We will need you to inventory your personal effects,” the Armani on my right said. He 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.

“It'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.

“Okay,” 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.

“I 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.

“And 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 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.

 

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 turning red. On Columbia Road, I slipped the bike under a tin outcropping on the building across the street from my first-floor apartment and secured the front wheel to the frame with a Kryptonite lock, implacable enemy of the inexhaustible bike thieves of Adams Morgan. The fat El Salvadoran kid who sat watching the space waited for me to dig a buck out of my jeans.

“Buenas tardes. Comó está?”

“Not so bad,” the kid said with a yawn. He had a twelve-inch Quiznos sub in one hand, a Negro Modello in the other. Just another night's work.

The kid's mother and father and eight siblings lived in the basement apartment just below me. Next door to me was two-thirds of a wanna-be Krautrock band. In the floors above, where the apartments got bigger, were a gay ménage à trois, two straight couples with little kids, three full floors of daddy's girls and mama's boys. I didn't exactly fit into Adams Morgan, but I didn't want to live anywhere else. The dim entries, the smell of rancid grease, the ambient din all reminded me of Lima.

I flipped on the television and flipped it off again. Brain poison. Took out a bottle of Johnny Walker and put it back again. Liver poison. Thought about the clubs all along the street and gave up on that as well. Too early. Too late. Too depressing. From the bottom drawer of the dresser I pulled out five years' worth of Riggs bank statements and settled down at the circular table stuck into the little bay at the front of the apartment. Outside, under the sodium streetlight the canary-yellow Norton gleamed through a halo of a steady drizzle.

When I looked up again, the drizzle had turned to rain. An RV blocked the view. 1-800-
RV
-4-
RENT
read the sign on the side. Below it, a fiery sunset lit a landscape of mesas and prong-horn antelope. Funny, you never see RVs in Adams Morgan. I went back to the statements: nothing, no surprises, not a thing out of the ordinary I could spot. My check was automatically deposited every two weeks. My savings account never seemed to go up or down. If there was a bubble anywhere, I couldn't see it.

I got the whiskey out again, got a glass—this time I meant it—and was just beginning to pour when I heard a punishing sound from outside: metal ground up and dragged along the macadam. The RV was just pulling away as I hit the street. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the El Salvadoran kid was gone. Just down the way, a Metrobus driver was cursing, trying to yank the wreck of a canary-yellow Norton Commando out from his undercarriage.

“Fuckin' just came out of nowhere!” he was yelling. “Right into the fuckin' middle of the fuckin' road. Nobody fuckin' gives a fuck about fuckin' nothin' no fuckin' more!”

I helped him drag the tangle of steel off to the side of the street, then waited while the gawkers drifted away. It didn't take long: These remains were artificial, not human.

I was standing by myself, toeing the crushed gas tank, wishing I had at least thrown on foul-weather gear, and thinking that even Superman didn't mess with Kryptonite, when I felt more than saw someone coming down the sidewalk, walking fast, straight at me. White, black, Hispanic? I couldn't tell. It was too dark to see anything other than that he was wearing a forest-green poncho, hood up, and a pair of basketball shoes the size of canoes. His arms were under the poncho—with or without a weapon, I had no way to know, but I hadn't stayed alive by assuming the best about human nature. I was just about to take a step sideways and kick in his right knee when whoever it was took a sharp right turn and set off across the street.

“Silly, paranoid fool,” he said as he passed me, in a voice as void of accent as any human voice could be.

Was he talking to himself? Nuts? Talking to me? I watched him turn left on the other side of the street and head west practically at a run, before he suddenly darted into an alley and disappeared. It was at that last moment, just over his shoulder, that I saw the RV idling three blocks down Columbia, double parked, blocking a lane. The brake lights were on but nothing else. The curtain in the rear window was parted. It was too dark to see if anyone was looking out.