Blow the House Down by Robert Baer

By the time we hit the alley’s cobblestones, the Crown Vic was in a full skid. We just missed slamming into the side of Kinko’s.
    Low key it wasn’t, but there was no way in hell anyone could see Willie slam the brakes just as we turned left on Prospect or me bail out in the fraction of a second he needed to power up again.

CHAPTER 8
    I   WAITED IN THE SHADOWS under a dripping oak tree until Willie was long gone around the corner. By the time a tail caught up to him, they’d see only the Crown Vic’s rear lights going up 35th Street. I waited some more just to see if anything living moved, wishing to hell I’d brought an umbrella. Then, when I knew for sure it was impossible to get any wetter, I jammed the watch cap on my head and set off on foot almost back to where I had come from. Frank Beckman lived on Tuttle Place, in Kalorama, five minutes by foot and a thousand miles in every other way from where my twisted Norton lay rusting in the rain.
    I worked my way up through Georgetown, scrambled over the high iron fence on R Street that fronts Oak Hill Cemetery, and followed the slope down through the tombstones and monuments until I hit the bicycle trail that runs through Rock Creek Park. Three minutes later, I was under the Massachusetts Avenue bridge. Another fifty yards along, I forded the creek as best I could—my Nikes were already soaking—waited for a gap in the traffic, then sprinted across the parkway and clawed my way up the steep eastern slope of the valley. I came out pretty much where I expected to: on Belmont Road, a block north of Tuttle Place and two blocks from Frank Beckman’s tastefully imposing Georgian mansion.
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    I first met Frank Beckman in Brazzaville, in the Congo, in 1979, on the evening after the French embassy’s chef had been eaten by a crocodile. It was all anyone could talk about. The chef had slipped out of the kitchen between the soup and fish course and walked down to the river. For what? A tryst? A fistful of something to dress the salad with? No one knew. One of the waiters heard him scream. A passerby saw thrashing just below the riverbank, but it was pitch black out on the water and crocodiles were everywhere. There was nothing to be done. The chef’s toque was found the next day, snagged on a branch a half mile downstream. That was the other question on everyone’s tongue: Had the croc bothered with a red wine sauce or devoured the chef au naturel? Even then, Brazzaville was not the world’s most sympathetic place.
    I was assigned back then to Dubai, covering the Iranian revolution. (This was 1979, in the pre-Webber days, when the base actually knew its ass from third base.) But mostly I was on the road, going wherever a Farsi speaker might prove useful: Manila, Khartoum, even (of all places) Brazzaville. Headquarters wanted me to pitch the first secretary at the Iranian embassy, a fat, fish-mouthed Khomeini devotee whose father had owned the Cadillac franchise in Tehran back in the days when the Shah was among his best customers.
    Frank had been scheduled to take over the station in Brazzaville six months earlier, but a nasty divorce kept him tied up in Washington. When he finally did make it to the Republic of the Congo, just a week before I did, he had wife number two in tow: a tender, Irish-Chinese mix of a thing named Jill, fresh out of Skidmore College with a B.A. in French lit. But if Jill was expecting a honeymoon or even intelligent conversation—in any language—she got little of the sort.
    Frank was Kentucky white trash through and through: high school into the army, army into the 82nd Airborne. At eighteen, he was jumping out of airplanes. He enrolled at the University of Kentucky on the GI Bill, graduated in his mid-twenties, joined the Agency a week later, and spent his thirtieth birthday hiding in an attic in Hue during Tet. Somewhere along the way he’d picked up a mid-Atlantic accent, a
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