Blow the House Down by Robert Baer Page A

Hew-Chatworth a visit.”
    â€œI was borrowing his phone.”
    â€œAnd then there’s Mr. Mohammad—”
    â€œJamal?”
    â€œOffshore accounts. Jamal’s real talent. Stopping by for a little tutoring?”
    Shut up, I told myself. Say nothing. Definitely not the time to kick the dog.
    â€œAnd—”
    And? It was Jim’s turn to take over the show.
    â€œAnd,” he began in a thin, stuttery voice. “And we have reason to believe that Mr. Cabrillo’s Afghan heroin trafficking ran through the Fergana Valley, through a place called Osh.”
    â€œThere’s a surprise,” I said, completely missing where this was all going.
    Scott almost jumped out of his chair to shut me up this time.
    â€œYou’ll have your chance, Waller!” And then in a much softer voice to Jim: “Could you be more specific?”
    â€œOf course. Specifically, we believe the Cabrillo family, an Afghan heroin cartel, and a smuggling network in Osh”—he turned the page of a pocket notebook and studied an entry—“were assisted by a Russian major based in the Pamirs.”
    Ah, now I could see where this segment was headed. In the early nineties I’d been detained driving through the Pamirs: the raw edge of the crumbling periphery, as we used to call it, wall to wall with Islamic rebels, drug cartels, and rogue Russian military units. One of the Russian units had stopped my wheezing Neva outside of Osh and found a CZ nine-millimeter semiautomatic tucked behind the radio. Before I could talk the major who led the unit into letting me go, Moscow sent Jim to spring me. That was it: the sum total of the story until this moment.
    â€œAnd what might be the significance of that?” Mary Beth asked in a stage voice.
    â€œWell…” Whoever was sitting just in front of Jim seemed to dig an elbow into his knee. “Mr. Waller’s trip through the Pamirs, we believe, was tied to a narcotics deal.”
    To his credit, Jim looked green at the gills as he spoke. I’d actually come to like him on our flight back from Bishkek. His first child, a girl, had cystic fibrosis. I knew the stakes. He needed a promotion, a fact I was sure hadn’t been lost on Webber.
    â€œIs there more?” Mary Beth prompted. “Anything else you feel might be pertinent to our line of inquiry?”
    â€œWell…” That same stall, even more painful now. “During the damage assessment, Mr. Waller was, um, unclear about his connections with the Russian major and how he was able to get himself released.”
    A lie, of course. Jim knew exactly what had happened. He’d spent the night guzzling vodka with me and the major. It was in the morning, too hung over to care, that the major set me free.
    I found myself looking from face to face, trying to figure if everyone around the table was in on it. Probably not. I knew Rosetti would eat a bowl of wriggling intestinal worms before he’d stake his squeaky clean on this assembly. For the first time I was confused. Now it really was time to back off.
    â€œSo what’s next?” I asked.
    â€œA polygraph,” Mary Beth said, now back to her normal low simmer. “It’ll put us on the road to clearing this up”—in the same way, I suppose, that removing a brain puts us on the road to clearing up brain cancer.
    â€œFine,” I said, “I’ll take a polygraph. I’ll take as many as you like. And you have my permission to go through my stuff, here, at home.”
    â€œOur people are going through your office right now,” Scott shot back, feeling at last that he had the upper hand. “I understand you’ll have some explaining to do.”
    Knowing security was ransacking my office on a sunny Friday morning in front of everyone who worked for me wasn’t exactly reassuring. I made a quick mental inventory of what they would find in my safe: the three spiral notebooks