Blow the House Down by Robert Baer Page A

travels even faster in Agency circles where it’s such a welcome diversion from the humdrum truth of collective incompetence.
    Frank was right: The Armagnac was a much better choice, and Simon left the decanter. I gave Frank the
Reader’s Digest
version of Webber’s show trial and the FBI investigation. When I got to the part about the spiral notebooks being gone, he stopped me.
    â€œWhat did you keep those for?”
    â€œWandering fires.”
    â€œKnock off the riddles.”
    â€œWe never found out who kidnapped and killed Bill Buckley. It’s been sort of my grail. You know that. You’re not curious?”
    â€œNo. If I’d stopped to solve every mystery there was, I’d still be in Kentucky.”
    â€œIt must have had something to do with the first day I walked in the place and saw those words chiseled in the marble: ‘Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’”
    Frank scowled as I said it: Stirring mottoes weren’t his thing, either. I was on to the Norton, the RV, and the guy in the poncho when he stopped me again. “Are you telling me someone’s out to get you? A conspiracy?”
    â€œFrank, c’mon, no one blow-torches a Kryptonite lock just to push the bike into traffic.”
    â€œMaybe you didn’t close the lock tight this time. Maybe that kid you pay to watch the bike watched the combination instead. That’s what you get when you live among the savages.”
    I didn’t forget to close the lock, and I didn’t live with savages. If Frank would ever walk the ten blocks to Adams Morgan and have a look around, he would know that. But he wouldn’t, and I wasn’t going to get into any of that with him.
    â€œHow about the RV?” I said instead. “Or the poncho guy calling me paranoid? It doesn’t—”
    â€œYour famous score-keeping.”
    â€œSomeone’s got to.”
    â€œI hate to tell you this, old pal, but Smirch and the Black Hand went the way of the Soviet Union, and I don’t really think the Trilateral Commission or the Masons care enough about you to steal your moped.”
    â€œNorton—it was a goddamn Norton Commando! Vintage.”
    â€œA thousand apologies. Your Norton. Your Commando. Your vintage. Mea culpa.”
    â€œI need to know why Webber and this guy Scott or whatever the hell his real name is are after me, Frank. The truth.”
    â€œMax, the truth never set a table or put a roof over anyone’s head.” Something chirped in the room. An ice-blue light flashed on the phone on the desk. Frank was out of his chair in a flash. He didn’t turn on the receiver until he was safely on the other side of the library doors.
    â€œYour highness,” he said again. I had no way of knowing if it was the same one. He was talking softer this time, running off a string of numbers from a sheet he’d snatched off the desk along with the phone. None of it meant a thing to me.
    While I waited for Frank to return, I studied the photos hanging on the wall behind his desk: Frank with George W. Bush, taken at what looked to be the Breakers in Palm Beach. Bush had his arm around Frank’s shoulder. Karl Rove and Jeb Bush were standing off to the side, talking. The White House had changed hands only six months earlier, but a photo of Frank with Bill Clinton and Al Gore that used to fill this spot was already gone, banished with the Florida vote and three-day-old fish. Next to the Bush photo was one of Frank with Saudi King Fahd at the Yamama palace. Fahd had his hand out, backside up, beckoning Frank to kiss it. Below that, Frank was cradling a hunting rifle next to Vladimir Putin, probably somewhere on the Russian steppe. Frank had been in Berlin when Putin was a young KGB officer there. They’d met a couple times at cocktail parties, had dinner once together that I knew of. Clearly, Frank had rewarmed their acquaintance. There were plenty of