Blow the House Down by Robert Baer Page B

States.
    It all made unassailable sense, Frank said, but Jill had other plans. Instead of the cottage, she took the money and bought a condo, and instead of Frank, she filled it with an associate professor of Slavic languages and sent hubby his walking papers.
Et voilà,
Frank was broke again. But America is the land of second acts, and Frank Beckman was its living proof.
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    First, Frank got his daughter back. India had just turned eleven when he was brought home for good and elevated to the seventh floor, number two in the Directorate of Operations, which made him, with about ten degrees of separation, my boss. Ten months later, long after midnight, India, a runaway, showed up on Frank’s doorstep in Herndon, Virginia, after a week of frantic searching. Her stepfather, by now a full professor and department chair, couldn’t keep his hands off her, she told Frank. Instead of immediately killing him—his first and deepest instinct—Frank got Jill to sign away her rights to India and set about learning to be a father.
    I could still remember almost every detail of Frank’s retirement party five years earlier, a barbecue in the fenced-in backyard of his soulless split-level. India was all of seventeen by then. She’d raced through high school as if it were a track event and had just finished her freshman year at Berkeley, animated in the way that only wildly precocious teenagers can be. Over plates of charred chicken earlier in the evening, India told me that she’d already taken courses from two of the people who taught me best.
    â€œJoy of my life,” Frank said, with only a slight slur.
    We were sitting on his postage-stamp-size deck, watching her bag up the plastic cups and paper plates that littered the yard. India was dragging a recycle bin behind her for the beer and wine bottles. I’d edged out the last of the guests a half hour earlier—a husband-and-wife analyst team that never knew when to leave. Frank and I were cradling snifters, pretending to admire the bouquet and color in the blue bug-light by the sliding glass doors. A bottle of Remy Martin sat on the table between us.
    â€œJoy O’ My Life!” he yelled out, louder this time.
    â€œI know, Dad. I know,” she called back with a laugh, “and you’re the joy o’ mine.”
    I was starting to feel as if I had intruded on some private ritual—a fly on a priest’s neck as he blessed the holy elements.
    â€œAnd Maxie, too,” she shouted a split second later to a roar of laughter.
    Beside me, I could see Frank flip open the top of an old Sealtest Dairy milk box, the kind my aunt used to keep on the back porch. He rummaged around and pulled out a dirty towel. I could already smell the gun oil.
    â€œI bought it last year,” he told me as he folded the corners down. “Didn’t buy it, really. Traded a silver Berber dagger for it. Some brother down in Southeast with a taste for antiques.”
    It was a nice piece, a Beretta six-millimeter with a professionally made silencer, the preferred weapon of Middle East assassins.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWhy—” Not a question. He tilted the Remy Martin bottle in both our directions, wrapped the gun up again, and laid it back in the Sealtest box.
    â€œWhy. Because I still wanted to murder the son of a bitch for what he did to India. I figured, What the hell: I retire, I even the score, I die. Case closed.”
    â€œAnd?”
    India was waving to us from the far end of the yard, a pair of garbage bags over her shoulder. She was kicking the recycle bin ahead of herself as she worked.
    â€œI decided to get rich instead.”
    It took a few years, but damn if he didn’t.
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    A miniature guy airing out his miniature schnauzer on the other side of Belmont took one look at me trudging out of the woods, flipped open a cell phone, hit something on speed dial, and took off running, dragging the little rat dog on its