Free Blow the House Down by Robert Baer Page B

the basement and slid past the resident barrio. Uni-vision was cranked up to high volume: a soccer game, Nicaragua against somebody, a tie, injury time. I could have kicked down the back door instead of using the knob and no one would have heard. In the alley, I all but knocked over the El Salvadoran kid. He was peeing against the Dumpster, eyes wide as a raccoon, stoned out of his mind.
    I wandered down the alley, lingered by a Dumpster or two myself, and startled enough rats to stock a leper colony. The only way to see me was through a pair of night-vision binoculars, a league I wasn’t prepared to play in. Normally, the stoops would have been packed all the way along Euclid and back up Ontario, but the rain had driven the street life inside. Willie was just pulling up as I turned back onto Columbia. He had the car in gear before I closed the door.
    â€œStraight to St. E’s or should we give them a run?” he said. St. E’s is St. Elizabeths, the local loony bin, home to Ezra Pound and John Hinckley Jr., among other famous nuts.
    â€œRock Creek,” I told him, staring out the back window. “Take Memorial Bridge to the GW Parkway.” I was checking to see if anyone had pulled out behind us when Willie tossed a box of Kleenex into the back and flipped down the mirror on the passenger’s side. A cobweb covered the entire left side of my face. My ear had disappeared. I never wanted to meet the spider that made it.
    I guided Willie along a countersurveillance route in northern Virginia I’d run at least fifty times: a loop-de-loop at the I-395 exchange, a quick on-and-off at the Key Bridge / Rosslyn exit, a U-turn just after Spout Run, enough traps so that a tail either had to show itself or lose you. It was as subtle as a quadruple bypass, but subtlety wasn’t the point. The Norton was proof enough that all wasn’t well in my little world. No reason to pretend I was out for an evening drive. The only thing I cared about right now was a couple hours of privacy with a person who didn’t even know I would be meeting him.
    Basically, I was flying blind in the backseat. I needed the rearview and side mirrors to check everything out, but Willie had those. Just to complicate things, there was way too much traffic. Didn’t anyone sleep anymore? Worse, the rain was starting to sound like a Bombay monsoon, a steady drumbeat on Willie’s vinyl roof.
    It crossed my mind to tell Willie what was going on, why I’d gotten him out of bed to give me a ride. If there was anyone I could trust outside the Agency, it was Willie. But how could I ever explain the whole insane run in New York, the alligator clips and the stolen phone line, the call to Geico to convince anyone listening to my phone I was still in my apartment, now this? Spending a life doing anything and everything you can to protect your agents puts you inside a rare subset of existence. It all made sense to me. But Willie wasn’t there. Wise as he was, he’d never get it. Espionage is like the world at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. When a creature from it suddenly gets dragged to the surface, no one knows what to make of the thing.
    â€œPhone me in two but not on my land line. On this one.” I dropped the number of the ghost cell phone on the front seat.
    Willie didn’t ask why. I doubt he even wanted to know why, but I knew he would play by my rules.
    We had crossed Key Bridge and were headed back through Georgetown on M Street when I warned Willie we’d be making a hard left after the old Eagle Liquor and a quick jog up to Prospect. He inched along, waiting for a gap in the oncoming traffic, until we both saw a space just large enough for the ex-Norton.
    â€œHit it!” I yelled.
“Now!”
But Willie already had.
    The Crown Vic hydroplaned across only inches behind a Navigator packed with high-schoolers and dead in front of a couple in a Lexus. Underwear would be changed early tonight.