Free Blow the House Down by Robert Baer Page A

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.

CHAPTER 7
    B ACK IN THE APARTMENT, it took me a few minutes to find my Majestic lock-picking kit—for some idiotic reason, I’d hidden it inside the toaster—and a few minutes more to get through the lock on the utilities’ door. The chirpy gay ménage à trois in 4C had gone out of their way the previous morning to tell me that they would be sunning themselves in user-friendly Laguna Beach while I sweated through D.C.’s summer. The least they could do, I thought, was loan me their phone line. I used a pair of alligator clips to tie into the interface terminal, then rang up Willie.
    â€œHey, what are you up to?” I asked, pretending to be surprised he was asleep.
    â€œShootin’ hoops. What else a nigga be doin’ at two in the morning in the pourin’ rain?”
    â€œIt’s only nine-thirty. Willie, I got a little problem.”
    â€œEveryone’s got problems, Maxwell. You heard of original sin? ‘In Adam’s fall sinned we all.’”
    â€œI’m serious.”
    â€œSo am I. Can’t it wait until morning? I’m up at five.”
    â€œRemember where you drop me?”
    â€œI’m not senile yet, my friend. You mean—”
    I cut him off. Stolen line or not, the phone is your worst enemy. “Yeah. I’ll be there. Pick me up in fifteen.”
    I’d known Willie for twenty years. We’d first met through Stash, an old Air America pilot who’d lost a leg and a foot in Laos. Two appendages shy of a driver’s license, Stash hired Willie and his taxi to get back and forth to his make-work job in Seven Corners. I rotated back to the field shortly before budget cuts forced Langley to retire Stash and send him home to die, but I made it a point to call Willie whenever I was in Washington and needed a ride your average cabbie couldn’t give you. Willie looked like a mortician’s assistant, but he had the heart of a NASCAR driver and the soul of a wolverine.
    Stash and I had never told Willie where we worked, but he’d figured it out listening in on our war stories about shit holes like Laos and the Congo. Willie didn’t say anything, just shook his head, probably thinking what fools white people are, but when his son had spent half his senior year in high school trying to decide between going to Georgetown to study international relations—a straight shot at the State Department—or heading north to Cornell to become an engineer, Willie talked him into Cornell. He knew a dead-end road when he saw one, and he’d had his own turn with international relations, serving Uncle Sam on the Batangan Peninsula with the 11th Infantry Brigade just about the time William Calley Jr. and his platoon were slaughtering peasants wholesale.
    I went back upstairs to my apartment, put on a Levi’s jacket, and stuffed a black watch cap in the pocket—the only thing I could find in a hurry to keep the rain off me. Then I grabbed a sterile cell phone I’d stowed under the socks in my top dresser drawer and jotted down its number on a scrap of paper. I used the land line to call Geico and report the accident, hoping I would be put on hold the way I always was when I had something important to discuss. I wasn’t disappointed. A digital voice said it would be a twelve-minute wait. As I lay the phone on the floor, I crossed my fingers and hoped she was right. Twelve minutes was just about what it would take for Willie to throw a slicker over his pj’s, fire up the Crown Vic, and make it the half dozen blocks to Ontario Liquors.
    I took the stairs to