The Company We Keep

by Robert Baer

  Silverton makes up for remoteness with small-town friendliness. It’s the kind of place where if you need something from the hardware store and it’s not open, you call the owner, go over to his house, and get the keys. We discovered this the first week we moved here. Bob was standing in front of the house, trying to figure out how to haul away a pile of dead brush, when a local we know walked by and told Bob to borrow George’s truck. The man pointed at an old navy blue Ford F-150 parked down the street. “The keys are in it,” he said, adding that George wouldn’t mind. Not long after, a tire went flat on our pickup and we left it for the next morning to fix. We woke up to find that someone had already changed it for us.

  The phone rings one Thursday morning. It’s rained for the last two days, but it’s a washed, cloudless blue sky today. I listen as Bob talks, his voice getting louder.

  “No, you can’t land here.” Bob looks over at me, frowning.

  “Yes, I do believe you that it’s on the charts, but …”

  He stops to listen.

  “No, they never built it,” Bob says. “I’m telling you, it’s not there. Tell your pilot that what he’s looking at is a landing strip plotted out in 1947. They just never made new maps.”

  “Who was that?” I ask when he hangs up.

  “Some guy named Patrick calling from his jet.”

  Patrick tracked down Bob through a journalist at Newsweek. There’s something he wants to discuss with Bob that he can’t put in writing or talk about over the phone.

  All right, I knew Bob hadn’t fallen off the edge of the earth in moving to Silverton, but a cold call from a stranger in a private jet trying to land on an imaginary airstrip is more than odd. And while we stopped being spies a long time ago, old habits die hard. I tell Bob he has to meet this guy in a public place, somewhere I can watch. I suggest Handlebars, a bar owned by a friend. It’s a charmingly rustic place decorated with game trophies and other backcounty bricabrac, and it’s crowded all day. A couple of times I volunteered there, and it will be a good place for me to go unnoticed, as if I were working there. If there’s trouble, I’ll call Mike McQueen, the undersheriff.

  McQueen is not someone you want to mess with. A few months ago a guy in a ski mask fled a traffic stop in Ouray, a mining town across Red Mountain Pass. McQueen chased the man from the top of the pass, down the most dangerous highway in America, across two more 11,000-foot passes. The state patrol was waiting on the south side of the pass, and, knowing he was trapped, the driver headed off on a dirt road. McQueen followed him to the road’s end. He’d alerted the police tactical squad in Durango, but now decided he could take care of this himself. As McQueen approached the car, he spotted the man putting on a flak jacket and taking a rifle out from behind the seat. When the man aimed his rifle at him, Mike drew his .45 and shot him in the forehead, killing him instantly. He was a hundred feet away. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation said they’d never seen precision shooting like that.

  I’m behind the bar when Bob comes through the door first, followed by a bear of a man dressed in a turtleneck and Levi’s. Just behind him is a much smaller man with olive skin, a thick beard, and an old-fashioned hunter’s cap with the flaps down but untied. He’s definitely Middle Eastern.

  Handlebars isn’t too busy, and between making drinks and talking to Ken, the owner, I keep an eye on Bob’s table. Whatever they’re talking about has Bob engrossed. As I probably should have expected, the duo’s odd arrival aside, nothing out of the ordinary happens.

  When I get home, Bob shows me Patrick’s business card. He’s Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com. It’s the company that has commercials with the catchy line, “It’s all about the O.” The man in the hunting cap is the son of a famous Lebanese politician.

  “What did they want?” I ask.

  “They told me the financial markets are going to collapse. Something to do with naked short trading, and corrupt Wall Street bankers ripping off widows and orphans. I understood about a tenth of it.”

  “You don’t know anything about finance.”

  “I told them that. But they had this idea that somehow an ex-CIA operative could get to the bottom of it. Too many Hollywood movies, I guess. They wanted me to go home, pack, drive to Durango with them, and jump on their jet.”

  “You shoulda gone.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family:

  Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.

  —Jane Howard, Families

  Silverton, Colorado: BOB

  The last week in October there’s already a good dusting of snow on the peaks around Silverton. The aspens are bare, and the shop owners are nailing up plywood over their windows against snowdrifts soon to come. The only cars on Greene Street belong to the last hunters of the season.

  Our two Labs watch as I clean out the fireplace. I know what they want: a hike in the mountains. They don’t care what the season is. Cabin fever is cabin fever. Dayna is restlessly surfing the Internet.

  “What do you want to do today?” I ask.

  Instead of answering, she turns her laptop so I can see the screen. A woman in Grand Junction has a litter of Lab puppies up for adoption.

  The next day on the way to Grand Junction, we tell each other we’re just going to take a look. Do we really need three big dogs? Can we fit three Labs in our station wagon? Another dog is a big decision, and we should take time to think about it. But I’ve seen the list Dayna has folded in her pocket: a puppy bed, a dish, tiny rawhide bones—the whole starter kit.

  Dayna is first out of the pickup and walks over to a lady standing behind a wire mesh fence. I stand back and watch, pretty certain how this is going to end. As soon as Dayna lets herself into the enclosure, a little yellow puppy breaks from the litter and runs up to her. She picks it up in both arms and turns to me with a very happy smile. I know we’re not leaving without it. Dogs adopt Dayna, not the other way around.

  As soon as we get back home, Dayna makes a bed for the puppy next to ours, on her side. That night she gets up at least five times, clutching the tiny Lab tightly as she descends the steep stairs from our loft. She stands out in the cold to let it pee. In the morning, she makes a bed out of old blankets for the puppy so it can sit at her feet while she’s on the computer.

  In December we drive to Corona del Mar to spend Christmas with Dayna’s parents, taking our three dogs with us.

  On Christmas Eve, Dayna’s mother asks her husband to make a fire. He’s now eighty-two. He gets up without saying a word and disappears into the garage that connects with the house. Five minutes later he’s back, unsteadily crossing the living room with a lighted blowtorch in one hand.

  At the end of dinner, right after dessert, Dayna’s father stands up and announces matter-of-factly that he’s going to go see “his other daughter.” I see Dayna’s head whip around like a barn owl. He finds his jacket and walks out the door.

  Dayna and I look at each other. Other daughter? There’s only Dayna and her brother. But I know who he’s talking about: his accountant, a woman Dayna’s age. The summer before, Dayna’s father and the accountant raced to Hawaii on a sailboat they’d bought together. But calling her his daughter? The woman has a father of her own. All along, Dayna’s mother keeps loading the dishwasher, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Dayna has to hold back her tears.

  Two days after we’re back in Silverton, we agree to meet a couple in Ouray for dinner. The sky is dry when we leave the house, but as we wind our way up Red Mountain pass it starts to snow. And by the time we get to the top of the pass, it’s a whiteout. I can’t see the side of the road, and stop and turn off the engine. No other cars are moving, either, so it’s okay. We watch the snow in silence for a while.

  “You know running a dog kennel isn’t going to do it for you,” I tell her. “Or for us.” Neither of us confuses dogs with people.

  We go back to looking straight ahead at the snow. We’re no
t going to make it to Ouray for dinner. I try my cell phone to call the couple we’re supposed to have dinner with. But there’s no signal.

  I finally ask the question that’s been on my mind for a long time. “Hey, what do you think about adopting?”

  “Don’t joke about this.”

  “I’m not.”

  “This is serious stuff.”

  Dayna’s surprised, but in a way we’ve been edging toward this moment ever since we first moved in together. While we talked around the subject of having a child for a long time, we never could come to a decision, mainly because our lives kept slipping moorage: Beirut, Geneva, New York, Washington, now Colorado. It’s been on my mind because my family has been drifting away.

  My three children now all live abroad. My two daughters are in school, one in Paris and the other in Cairo. Having grown up with their mother, they spend their vacations with her. Robert is living in the French house, and I rarely see him. Phone calls and e-mails are infrequent. It’s all even harder to take because it’s only now that I understand how thin is the thread our relationship hangs from. It’s impossible to know what will happen to us, being apart for so long.

  I’ve been estranged from my mother since 1997, when I stupidly wandered into the Democratic Party’s campaign-finance scandal. It happened when one of my informants told me he was giving money to the Democratic Party in return for White House favors. I reported everything to my bosses, sending memo after memo. No one said anything, but when the scandal broke in the press, I somehow was dragged into it. When I had to hire a lawyer to represent me for a grand jury hearing, I told my mother. I’d thought she’d be merely curious, but she assumed the worst. “You wouldn’t be so nervous if you hadn’t done something wrong,” she wrote. When I asked to come to Los Angeles to explain that I’d only done my duty, she said no. “I don’t feel like cleaning my house.” There were a few more calls, but they all ended acrimoniously.

  Silverton has been a wonderful way station and refuge, the Alp I dreamed about living on with Dayna. But we both realize that we can’t stay here forever, on our own like this, only thinking about taking care of ourselves. If nothing else, it’s too remote. So last spring we found a two-bedroom Craftsman house in Berkeley, California, on a blocked-off street, a place where you don’t worry about kids and cars. A school sits catty-corner, a grocery store four blocks away. BART is another block away, and from there it’s a twenty-minute hop into San Francisco—suburbia and city lights in the same package. Dayna’s the one who picked out the neighborhood, and I have this inkling it’s with a child in mind. But, biologically, the clock has already raced past where it needs to be.

  The snow is thinning out now, and I start the pickup.

  “Are you sure you really want another child?” Dayna asks.

  “I’m sure.”

  FORTY-THREE

  Edhi established his first welfare centre and then the Bilqis Edhi Trust with a mere Rs. 5,000. What started as a one-man show operating from a single room in Karachi is now the Edhi Foundation, the largest welfare organization in Pakistan. The foundation has over 300 centers across the country, in big cities, small towns and remote rural areas, providing medical aid, family planning and emergency assistance. They own air ambulances, providing quick access to far-flung areas. In Karachi alone, the Edhi Foundation runs eight hospitals providing free medical care, eye hospitals, diabetic centers, surgical units, a four-bed cancer hospital and mobile dispensaries. In addition to these the Foundation also manages two blood banks in Karachi.

  Edhi is to Karachi what Mother Teresa was to the poor of Calcutta. Edhi and [his] wife Bilquees have spent a lifetime working for people, and their welfare work to date remains unparalleled in Pakistan. They are both very private people who shun publicity. They have had little formal education, and are totally committed to the cause of helping the poor and needy.

  —www.edhifoundation.com

  Berkeley, California: DAYNA

  Bob and I decide early on that we want to do an international adoption, preferably from a country we will return to as the child grows up. We also want to do the adoption ourselves—no international adoption agency, no middlemen or facilitators, no agencies that contract out to orphanages. It’s not the cost involved—we’re prepared to make a large donation. Rather, we’re determined to be very hands-on about this. Unlike a lot of couples who start down this same road, we have unusual resources in far-flung places. Surely, we think, two operatives with nearly thirty years of experience between them can figure out how to do this on their own.

  Chechnya is Bob’s idea—a war-torn country without organized international adoptions but with several large refugee camps. What could be a better fit? He gets on the phone to a KGB officer in the Caucasus, an old friend. I can hear only Bob’s end of the conversation.

  “An OR-PH-AN,” he says, repeating himself for the third time. Bob listens and then gives me the thumbs-up to let me know the guy’s going to help. But when he gets off the phone, he’s laughing, a bit nervously.

  “You won’t believe this one,” Bob says. “He told me that if we don’t find a Chechen orphan, he’ll make one for us.”

  It’s a dumb joke, of course, but soon enough we find out Chechen adoptions are not doable. Chechens are a close-knit Muslim society where orphans are taken in and cared for by extended families. Bob hits the same wall with his other contacts. The countries he knows best are Muslim, and adoptions are rare. I find it ironic that Bob’s friends can put their hands on a stolen Russian fighter, but can’t find us an abandoned child to take in.

  I’m the one who decides to look into adopting from Pakistan. It’s one of my favorite places, especially Peshawar, the dusty frontier outpost at the bottom of the Khyber Pass. I’d driven there the first time on the old Grand Trunk Road, barely surviving a terrifying game of chicken with big, colorful buses that pulled into the oncoming lane without looking. I was entranced by Peshawar’s old city, the houses and narrow streets, and the women in their colorful, head-to-toe abayas, with intricate cutouts to cover their eyes. It was all wildly exotic, a place I’d go back to in a second, given the chance.

  Scouring Pakistani law to see whether adoption is possible, I come across a Muslim welfare organization called the Edhi Foundation. It’s the vision of a husband-and-wife team, Abdul Sattar Edhi and Bilqis Edhi, who began by rescuing baby girls left in the street, taking care of them, and offering them up for adoption. Their foundation eventually turned into the largest relief organization in Pakistan, running a morgue, air ambulances, a cancer hospital, blood banks, aid for refugees, prisoner welfare services, and even an animal shelter. It also provides burials for unclaimed bodies.

  Bob, I know, is going to be impressed by the fact that the Edhi Foundation took care of the remains of Danny Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded in Karachi in February 2002. Bob had spoken to Danny just days before the reporter left for Karachi. Maybe, I think, there’s some kind of karma going on here—a life for a death, a new beginning for a brutal murder. Weirder things have happened.

  The more I read about Edhi, the more I see what it’s managed to accomplish in a country not known for its public service, the more fascinated I am. It won’t accept government funds, relying instead completely on donations. It also won’t accept donations from adoptive parents, to make absolutely certain that it won’t be dragged down into the muck of the international adoption business. Instead, it operates a “crèche” system in which parents who can’t afford to keep their babies leave them, Mrs. Edhi personally taking charge of placing them. Most end up with families outside of Pakistan, where they stand a better chance in life.

  In so many ways, this is just what Bob and I have been looking for. But I soon learn from my research that there’s a serious obstacle: in Pakistan a foundling is automatically considered a Muslim. And since Christians cannot adopt a Muslim child, the chances Edhi can help us are close to zero. We send in an application anyway, but it’s beginning to loo
k as if the most likely way for us to adopt in Pakistan is to locate a child under the care of a Christian church.

  Pakistan’s population is 2 percent Christian, nearly 3 million people. They live mostly in slums in the larger urban areas, and are frequently persecuted by Islamic fundamentalists. In the upside-down way I’ve come to think about these things, that’s an attraction: yes, I’d be taking our baby away from its community, but life in the United States would offer a child a way out of a grim future.

  Over the course of a week, we call everyone we know in Pakistan and make a long list of likely places that would know about orphans, from aid organizations to churches. I find a nun in Lahore who cares for abandoned Christian babies. I call every other day. She soon recognizes my voice, and after “hello,” she says, “No babies, no babies today.” After a few weeks of this, I start to realize how difficult it is not to go through an agency. And then, as so often happens with adoptions, the weeks turn into months, and the months add up to more than a year.

  When we settle into our new house in Berkeley—we’ve already picked out a room for our child-to-be—I’m still nowhere with the adoption. Everyone promises to write back. Some do, most don’t. I’ve started looking at other countries when one morning I open an e-mail from one of my new correspondents, a woman whose husband works for the United Nations. Attached is a picture of a little baby girl on a charpoy, a reed bed that sits on four short wooden legs. I can’t take my eyes off her. She’s adorable, a little pixie with dark eyes and curly black hair. She’s wearing ragged rose-and-cream pajamas. She stares at the camera as if she knows her picture’s being taken.