Excerpt: Robert Baer's New Book "Blow The House Down"

— -- CHAPTER 1

New York City; June 21, 2001, 11:02 A.M.

"Baton Rouge, Baton Rouge, this is Selma. How do you copy?"

"Five-by-five."

"Baton Rouge, no movement. Che is still at his last."

"Roger that, Selma. Maintain your current. Over."

The twelfth floor of the Deutsche Bank building on Park isn't a bad perch on Midtown: close enough to the pavement to spot the twenty-something MBAs, cell phones glued to their ears, bullshitting about make-believe deals; just high enough to appreciate the grid, the grandeur, how easy it would be to bring it all down with a dirty nuke. But there I go talking shop again.

London's more cosmopolitan. Paris more tarted up. For stolen wealth per square inch, there's no place like Geneva. But Manhattan is where the real money is. Something like half the currency in the world flows electronically through this city every day of the year. Close your eyes and you can almost hear the trillions zinging around the local cyberspace. All that money gives the city a sort of divine energy, and Madison Avenue writes the Bible, selling crap no one can afford to people who don't need it, from Edsels to Viagra and Brazilian butt lifts. No wonder the jihadists go to bed every night dreaming of pulverizing the place. (The fact that one in three Jews in America lives here doesn't hurt, either.)

Personally, I've had my fill of pulverized rubble. Beirut, Khobar, Nairobi--I know the way it smells when it's still smoking and soaked in blood, and how easy it is to make. Load a pickup with half-full acetylene tanks, fertilizer, and fuel oil, and you can take down most anything man-made that you can get under or inside.

I used to think spending the best parts of my life in the worst parts of the world was worth something, but my employer saw things otherwise. I'd reported one too many unpalatable truths, poked Foggy Bottom in the eye one too many times, told my own seventh floor to fuck off in one too many ways. "Intelligence" may be the snake oil we sell, but the one absolutely inexcusable character flaw inside the Beltway is candor.

After a quarter-century in the field, headquarters called me home early and put me out to pasture in an office park near Tysons Corner. The plan was to tie me up watching over a flock of retirees until I shuffled off into my own sunset, but that couldn't happen until I hit fifty, four years from now. In the meantime, I was working off a time card: eight-to-five, no weekend duty, all the "personal days" I needed. That's what I was doing right now: taking a Thursday to see friends in Midtown. Another gaper in the capital of grit. Or so I thought.

"Hey, c'mere and have a look," I said, staring down at Park. I tried to put a little urgency in my voice, enough to pry Chris Corsini away from his high-performance, posture-fit Aeron chair and triple-wide LCD screens. But Chris was a commodities trader. The only things that got him excited were seasonal draws on oil inventories and his annual bonus.

"No, I'm serious. Come here and take a look at these two."

Chris sighed as he pushed himself to his feet. "What's it now, Max, King Kong on the loose again?"

That's what I liked about Chris: Ever since I'd rappelled down the side of Sproul Hall into the dean's office, back in our undergraduate days at Berkeley, he'd decided I was a headcase. But unlike a lot of our classmates, he never held it against me. Maybe I helped balance out the picture-perfect wife in Darien, the three way-above-average pre-teens, and the metallic silver Porsche Carrera.