The Company We Keep

by Robert Baer

  —Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus

  Nicosia, Cyprus: DAYNA

  I sit on the floor in a bathing suit, my back propped up against a cheap futon, sweat dripping off my face. It’s only ten in the morning and already over ninety degrees. There’s not a sound from the street, the Cypriots having fled to the beaches.

  I pick up the muff earphones and listen to the static. It’s just the usual forty-eight volts DC running down the line. I haven’t heard the guy whose apartment we’ve wired for sound in the last twenty-four hours. I wonder if he’s away.

  I unplug the earphones and turn up the recorder enough to hear it in the kitchen while I make my second cup of coffee. I watch the kettle for a while and then lean over the sink to look out the window. At just the right angle, I can see his apartment. But his windows are closed, and I can’t see in.

  I’ve never seen the guy in person, although I’ve seen his photos. Someone else rented the apartment directly across the street so they had a full-face view when he came out his front door. He’s a lanky, good-looking guy with dark hair and boyish features—nothing remarkable about him one way or the other. The fact is, he could pass as one of us in his scruffy chinos and knit polo shirts, and sometimes a fisherman’s cap. In the photos it’s all so nonchalant that it’s hard to imagine he’s a murderer.

  The water boils, and I mix it with the last of my instant coffee. I’m going to have to go shopping. I remind myself that I don’t want to forget anything and have to go out in the heat a second time. I look for a piece of paper and a pen to make a list. I’m also going to pass by the Europa Hotel. Maybe they’ve received some new magazines. I’d read about anything to get me through the rest of the day.

  I try not to go out so much anymore. Last week when I was in Cyprus’s second largest city, Limassol, I was parked only five minutes when a cop pulled up behind me. He got out and tapped on my window. The cop said something on his radio, then bent down to take a look around the inside of my car. I had a map on the passenger seat. Didn’t I look like a tourist? He asked me if I’d accompany him back to the station. I didn’t have a choice. There, he wrote down my name and passport number, and asked why I was in Cyprus. When I told him I was a film scout, he absorbed the information without comment. I expected he’d ask what studio I worked for or something. (I had a story for that.) But he didn’t, and he let me go. Anyhow, it spooked me, and now I try to spend the least time I need to on the street.

  Two days later something else weird happened. I was coming down the elevator of the Europa Hotel when it stopped to let someone in. I recognized the guy right away, a teaching assistant I’d known at Berkeley and a former Olympic swimmer. He held his head to one side, recognizing me. “Dayna?” Dayna is not the name I’m using here, and I panicked a little, but we were the only ones on the elevator. We got off at the lobby, and I had no choice but to talk to him. He told me he was in Cyprus working for Gatorade, although he normally lives in Holland. When he asked what I was doing here, I told him my cover story, film scouting. He nodded his head as if it made perfect sense. He gave me his card. I told him I didn’t have one, but promised to get in touch when I was back in California. Fortunately, he was on his way to the airport and there was no more time to talk.

  I can’t decide what’s flimsier—my using this film-scout cover, his working for Gatorade and living in Holland, or the crazy coincidence of running into someone from a past life in an out-of-the-way place like Nicosia. I don’t know why, but it made me think about my last conversation with my husband. When I asked him what was going to happen to us, he didn’t say anything right away, but finally said he guessed we’d just go along until one of us met someone else.

  I sit back down against the futon with my coffee, and try to get into an old Italian Vogue. I put it down to listen to a noise in the hall, a door slamming and then a crying baby. It sounds like the neighbors are fighting again. I pick up the headphones to make sure the sound is still working.

  It’s two months now, and I still don’t really have a good feel for the guy. All they told me about him was that he was behind a handful of political assassinations in Turkey. But you couldn’t tell it from eavesdropping on him.

  One time he called a taxi company three times, complaining about his car not coming on time. He kept calm, and if he was angry it was pretty restrained. Another time he called a woman. He was playful at first, and I thought for a minute it was a girlfriend. But the conversation turned serious, and I doubted there was anything going on between them.

  Now he’s gone silent, and I’m left wondering what anyone would learn by eavesdropping on me. I never call from the apartment phone. If anyone were listening to it, they no doubt would decide that I’m some sort of shut-in with no friends or family. And even if I could call home, what would I say? I spend my days spying on a terrorist. Nothing could be more foreign to my self-made engineer father or my homemaker mother. My dad thinks I work for the military, while my mother believes my paycheck comes from an international moving company. But I wonder how grounded any of us really is. Aren’t we all some sort of phantom, not a whole lot different from the guy I’m eavesdropping on?

  By two, I’m bored beyond endurance. I’ve got to get out. I turn the recorder’s volume off and slide it into the concealment panel in the TV console, push it until it clicks closed, lock the windows, and quietly let myself out the apartment’s door.

  A couple of tourists are on the main street, Makariou, but the shops are all closed for the afternoon. I follow my usual route into the old city, passing through the old Venetian walls, cutting down a small alley that winds under latticed wooden balconies. In some places the sandstone walls are so close you can touch the houses on either side by raising your hands. I stop to smell the jasmine and bougainvillea from gardens I can’t see. An old woman in black comes out of a door and dumps a bucket of dirty water into the street.

  I take a left on the first street I come to, Artemidos, and walk down to the “blue line”—a UN-mandated separation line that divides the Turkish half of Cyprus from the Greek. I glance at the minaret of the mosque just on the other side, and then stop as I usually do to study a plywood board with pictures of missing people. No one new has been added.

  On the way back, I make my usual stop at the little Greek Orthodox church on Stasinou Street. I don’t know why, but recently I’ve started lighting candles for the missing. I light one now and sit in a pew in the dark, cool silence until a man comes in. He’s young, in his twenties. I watch him as he lights a candle, putting it near mine. At first I think he’s followed me here. But then he crosses himself and leaves.

  When I come out, it’s a lot cooler, and the shops are opening up. I stop at the gyro stand where they know me. A young boy who works there likes to practice his English. I order the same thing every day, and he starts making it when he sees me come in the door.

  My final stop is the corner market. Back in the apartment, I put the things away in the kitchen and take a bottle of water out of the refrigerator. I take the recorder out and put on the earphones. I’m startled to hear two voices. Our guy is angry, the other defensive.

  “You said that last time,” our guy says.

  “Yes,” the other voice says. “But the envelopes are ready now.” It’s someone I’ve never heard before; his English is halting, searching for words, as if he learned it in school and never had a chance to practice.

  “I need to see them now,” our guy says.

  “Tomorrow, maybe?”

  “No, let’s go now.”

  There’s never been anything like this before. I quickly put the recorder back in the concealment panel and slam it shut, harder than I intended. I grab my cell phone and a wide-brimmed straw hat, even though it’s dusk. I let myself back out and clatter down the steps into the street. I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do. See the two meet and then follow the unknown voice home to see where he lives?

  As soon as I step out of the apartment doorway and go aro
und the corner, I catch sight of our guy walking down Makariou, alone. It’s not even a decision—I follow him. I take note of what he’s wearing, a bluish polo shirt and jeans. They are clothes easy to lose sight of at this time of the evening, so I’ll have to stay a little closer to him than I normally would.

  He stays on the same side of the street and then stops abruptly in front of a store window. I slow down and watch him as he pats his jacket. He finds what he’s looking for, his cigarettes, and pulls one out to light it. He takes a deep drag, tilting his head back, exhaling up into the air.

  He continues toward the old city, with me twenty paces behind him. By now I know every street and alley here. And that’s what worries me. It’s a labyrinth, and to follow someone you need dozens of people with radios. There’s nothing I can do about it since I’m on my own. But I call my team leader to let him know.

  “Hey, I’m with our guy,” I say as soon as he picks up. “He’s going to meet somebody.”

  I sense he’s excited. “Stay with him as long as you can.”

  I hold back and keep my eyes on his shirt. I lose it for a second when he walks around a newspaper kiosk, and see too late that he’s stopped on the other side, reading a newspaper clipped to its corrugated roof. There’s no place to duck into, so I take out my cell phone again and pretend to dial, looking at the ground. If he notices me, he doesn’t show it. He buys a newspaper, rolls it up in one hand, and taps the other with it.

  Daylight is all but gone now, the store lights coming on. More people are out on the streets, escaping stifling apartments. I don’t stand out as much, but now, with the streets alive, it’s almost inevitable I’ll lose him.

  I close the gap a little, but he’s still too far ahead as he turns down a small alley. I cross the street and follow him, but when I turn the corner, he’s not there. There are three smaller alleys he could have taken. I take the one in the middle.

  I’m halfway down when I notice that I’m in the red-light district. A child-size girl sits in an open window, curtains waving in the breeze, flickering lamps behind her. I keep walking, turn down another small walkway, but it’s only more girls in more windows. I put my head down and walk back the way I came.

  It was all so sloppy, following him like this, but there wasn’t a choice. Just to make myself feel better, I stop for an ice-cream cone.

  FOURTEEN

  Sheldon Kornpett: “You were involved in the Bay of Pigs?”

  Vince Ricardo: “Involved? That was my idea.”

  —The In-laws, 1979

  Washington, D.C.: BOB

  Coming back to Washington from Tajikistan is like walking into your living room and finding all the furniture moved around. There are new Metro lines that go to places I’ve never heard of. Freeways have cloned themselves. Once-distant suburbs are cities unto themselves. Worse, maybe, no one much cares where you’ve been or what you’ve seen while you’re away.

  There’s also the financial shock of having to live like everyone else. One day you’re on Langley’s tab; the next you have to pay your own rent, buy your own car, keep a regular business day, and wear a suit you have to take to the cleaners. You don’t need long to get over the feeling that you can defy gravity. The Oktyabrskaya hotel starts to look not so bad.

  I’m back living with my family, the divorce postponed. I need to get everyone settled before I leave, and at the moment we can’t afford to live in two places. But I do manage, with my mother’s help, to put the kids in a French school to keep up their French. My wife’s in touch with the State Department to get back her job.

  And then there’s the rest of my family. It never seems to sit patiently waiting for you to return.

  Two weeks after I’m home from Tajikistan, a hospital in California calls me at home. The woman on the other end of the line tells me that my father is dying. She’s his nurse.

  She has an efficient voice, no trace of urgency or pathos. I wonder how many calls like this she makes a day.

  I ask her how long it will be. She says soon—that’s why she called. She is standing next to my father, who would like to say good-bye.

  A cousin had called me two months ago to tell me my father’s lung cancer was back. But I never suspected it was this advanced. I told myself there would be time to fly out to California to see him. There’s always time.

  I hear the nurse tell my father his son is on the phone.

  I wait, but no one says anything. “Hello?” I finally say. There’s a faint rasping. “Can you hear me?” I ask. There’s a longer rasp this time, forced and painful.

  “I love you,” I say. Although I barely know the man, that’s all I can think to say.

  There’s only silence now. I wonder if he’s understood me. Has my father lost his mind as well as his body?

  “I love you,” I say again.

  There’s no answer. I don’t know what to say now. It must be five minutes before the nurse comes back on the phone. “Your father’s been taken away.”

  Something else I soon have to wrestle with is that my career abruptly turns toxic. It all has to do with a National Security Agency message, Z/EG/00/60-95, and a CIA “criminal referral” to the Department of Justice. Translation: Six months after I’m back from Tajikistan, I’m sent to northern Iraq on a temporary assignment to work with the Kurds. But within days of my arrival I’m caught up in a plot by a handful of Iraqi generals to oust Saddam Hussein. Their plan hinges on a classic military coup d’état—a dozen tanks boxing in Saddam at his palace in Al ‘Awjah, a village just south of Tikrit. But Langley loses its nerve and cuts the knees out from under us all, and the generals abort their coup. A senior American military officer later would describe it as the “Bay of Goats”—a reference to the CIA’s disastrous attempt to invade Cuba in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs. But I myself think the coup stood a chance of succeeding.

  I thought being called back from the field after Iraq and chained to a desk would be punishment enough for trying to do what I understood my job to be. (I thrive best at the outer fringes of bureaucracies, not at their core.) But the FBI has other thoughts. It’s investigating the coup attempt to see if there is enough evidence to prosecute my team and me for the attempted murder of Saddam Hussein.

  All this puts me in a kind of limbo. The CIA will almost certainly let me limp into retirement five years from now, but my corridor reputation—always shaky—is mortally wounded. I can see it in the way colleagues avoid eye contact, in the lack of meaningful work. If I wait out the five years I have until retirement and grab the pension, I’ll become one of those Incredible Disappearing Employees, hidden in an office somewhere behind the copying machines.

  On the other hand, if the Justice Department decides to prosecute me for the attempted murder of a foreign head of state, I’ll need the CIA. In an investigation like this, it’s better to be a federal agent than not. I’m fairly certain that the Company will stand behind me, if only because we’re at almost constant war with the FBI, and they can’t let one of their own go down just like that.

  But if I’m cleared and left alone, I’ll ask myself every day whether I want to hang on until I retire. The Middle East is in my blood. And no one has to tell me that there’s little chance the CIA will ever send me back there. I suppose I could move there after I retire, but it strikes me as sad, the old ex-spook holding on to stale memories.

  In the meantime, I live for visits from my friends from the Middle East.

  I stand in the window of our Arlington apartment looking out, and watch what’s predicted to be the biggest blizzard in decades roll down the deserted street. The snow only started this morning, but already it’s hard to tell what’s a drift and what’s a buried car.

  I should stay home, but an Iraqi, Marwan, has flown down from Toronto the night before to see me. He’s only here for a day, or at least until he can fly back out. Normally I’d stay in, but Marwan is a friend—a real one. We make an effort to keep up the relationship: we promptly return calls, go out of our way to
see each other, ask after family. Marwan knows my mother, but I did not introduce them as a ploy to enlist Marwan in the CIA’s service. Marwan is not recruitable.

  I figure I have maybe four or five hours before they close I-66, enough time to go see him for an hour or two. I find my son Robert playing in his room and ask him if he wants to take a ride with me. He says no; he wants to go sledding. I tell him we’ll sled later, that he should go find his coat while I look for a shovel.

  Only a few cars brave I-66, and even the four-wheel-drives move at a snail’s pace. Oddly, our front-wheel-drive Toyota Tercel does fine. “Nice ride we have,” I say, trying to make conversation. Robert doesn’t answer and stares straight ahead. He trusts his mother’s driving more than he does mine. She would never go out in a storm like this.

  The snowplows are not out yet on M Street in Georgetown. We pass four people on cross-country skis coming down the middle of the street. I wonder if we’re going to be able to make it back home. I don’t say anything to Robert, but I actually would look forward to getting stuck, the two of us staying at a hotel, giving me a chance to connect with him away from his sisters and his mother.

  A great bank of snow almost makes me miss the turn into the Four Seasons. The Ethiopian doorman inside the front entrance doesn’t see us until we pull up under the portico. He looks at us in disbelief as Robert and I climb out in mountain hiking boots and down parkas, like some advance party of refugees come to squat in his hotel.

  Marwan is downstairs in the lounge, sitting at a table by the piano, a pot of tea in front of him. Dressed in flannel slacks and an expensive cashmere sports coat, he looks at home here, as if he spent his life in luxury hotels. A successful, globe-trotting oilman, he probably has. We’re the only ones in the lounge. Marwan is delighted I’ve brought Robert along, shaking his hand and asking him about school. He’s known Robert since he was one year old. I haven’t yet told Marwan about the divorce, or the FBI investigation.