The Company We Keep

by Robert Baer

  Cheryl is a contractor for the Agency for International Development. A big, ungainly, sunburnt girl, she’s cut from that fabric of expatriates who happily go from one international disaster to the next. Dragging her along—an American official who can truthfully say what she does—is good protective covering.

  The few people we pass in Pale stop and stare at our Cherokee with French diplomatic plates, narrowing their eyes in suspicion and hate. You definitely feel it when you’re on the wrong side of a conflict.

  We pick an empty café and sit outside. It crosses my mind they might not serve us. But a tiny woman in a bloodred apron comes out to take our order. There’s not even the hint of a smile, though. No one wants to drink, but in solidarity with the Serbs we order their favorite drink, plum brandy.

  A couple minutes later a lady in her seventies walks up to the café’s terrace, and takes a seat at a table. She looks at the ground, avoiding eye contact. I notice her hands are trembling. She sits two tables away from us, facing the street. When she finally does look over, she’s crying, daubing her eyes with a cotton handkerchief. Cheryl gets up and walks over to sit with her.

  Dan and I drink as Cheryl talks to the lady in broken Serbo-Croatian. The waitress stands in the door of the café, watching. I notice that across the street a couple have pulled the curtains open in their house, looking at us.

  Cheryl takes the old lady by the arm and helps her up to walk over to our table. Cheryl says the lady wants to go to Sarajevo with us in our car. The lady looks from me to Dan, her blue eyes pleading. I think she’s going to start crying again.

  Cheryl explains that the woman’s son lives in Sarajevo. She hasn’t seen him since the beginning of the war in 1992. She was always too scared to cross the confrontation lines, convinced the Bosnian Muslims would arrest her because she’s a Serb. She would risk crossing it in a diplomatic-plated car, though.

  Dan shakes his head no. I’m his senior, though, and say okay.

  We’ve broken every other rule in the book today, so why not one more? And now the day has a purpose.

  Headquarters has a problem with my tactics—living and working out of private houses, constantly switching cars, meeting in places like Pale. They haven’t quite accepted that in Sarajevo we have no choice but to operate like light cavalry—mobile, fast, elusive. And I’m not sure anything like this has ever been done before. The CIA has forever worked from fortresses from which operatives sally forth, steal secrets, and then gallop headlong back in, pulling up the drawbridge behind them.

  After my first trip to Sarajevo, when I was back at Langley, I explained to the Bosnian branch chief what I was planning. She looked at me in total confusion, as if I were speaking in tongues. When I told her the entire operation would be run from a house I’d rented in Butmir, a suburb near the airport, she asked if it would be secure. There’s nothing to secure, I said. We’ll be paperless. Her confusion deepened when I told her that I intended to keep the parabolic mic in an ordinary apartment, rotating teams in and out to man it. And that the military support team, an Arabic translator and a communicator, would be in yet another house. When I said I would walk the tapes from the parabolic mic up to the support team’s house every day to translate them and cable them back to Washington, she looked at me as if I were making fun of her.

  The branch chief was a small woman with granny glasses and tendrils of auburn hair running down the sides of her head. She reminded me of my second-grade teacher. She’d never worked in the field. I would have gone on, but I just didn’t think that she’d get the anonymity part. The thing is, you can’t do things by the book in Sarajevo. I just knew instinctively that all the shuffling around, dressing like the locals, paying in cash, never talking on a phone or a radio, was the only way to escape the attention of Hizballah. At the same time I knew it was unorthodox and risky. But I didn’t see another way.

  “What makes you think this is going to work?” she asked as I started to walk out the door to go back to Sarajevo.

  “Watching Hizballah in Beirut.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. I was the chief of this lash-up, and she could only stand back and watch.

  In the meantime, I’d settle for an apartment with a line-of-sight view of the Hizballah safe house.

  NINETEEN

  I cannot forget that picture of the little girl who, after the grenade fell on the marketplace in Sarajevo in August, turned to her mother and asked where her hands went, only to find out she had also lost her father.

  —Carl Bildt, High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina

  Sarajevo: DAYNA

  In the second week of June, Charlie, the ex-Marine jet pilot, and I come down to Sarajevo from Tuzla to help Bob find an apartment for the parabolic mic. But by day three we sit in our usual café in the old city, talking about the same thing we talk about every morning: we’re getting absolutely nowhere finding one. It shouldn’t be this hard. There are hundreds and hundreds of empty apartments, most abandoned from the beginning of the war. You can walk by and look in the windows, the places untouched, un-looted, the dusty furniture still there, just waiting for nice, polite renters like us. The problem is finding the owners.

  There are no real estate agents in Sarajevo. No one hangs out “for rent” signs. If there are listings in the newspapers, we can’t understand them. Other foreigners like the press corps and international aid workers live in the Holiday Inn. And when they do decide to move into an apartment, they have “fixers” find them, local Bosnians with fat Rolodexes. We don’t have that luxury. Fixers report to the local police.

  We are on our second cup of cappuccino when the café starts to fill up with men of all ages, probably all out of work. They smoke one cigarette after another, staring at Charlie and me, the only two foreigners in the place. The windows steam up from the espresso maker. This is going to be another long day, I think. There’s no way we’re going to find an apartment before the parabolic mic arrives.

  We’re nursing the coffee along when Charlie sits up as if called. He smiles and says he has an idea. I wait for him to clue me in, but instead he tells me to stay put. He gets up and pushes out the door. I watch him out the window as he half trots down the street. God knows what he’s up to now. I pull out an old Herald Tribune and start reading an article I must have read three times already.

  Last week, Charlie went out to take a look at the Saturday car market, which is held in a field outside town. He came back after an hour with a banged-up white Ford Taurus with Sarajevo plates. Charlie said he didn’t have to show his passport or anything when he bought it. I asked him if he thought it was stolen. He said it probably was, but no one was going to care.

  When Charlie comes back, he’s got a big smile on his face, fanning a stack of three-by-five cards. He sits down and drops them in front of me. There’s something in Serbo-Croatian typed on them.

  “I give up. What are they?” Charlie’s pleased that he’s made me ask.

  “The girl who typed them for me was very sweet,” he says. “A doll, in fact.” Charlie won’t wipe the grin off his face.

  “Forget it, Charlie. I’m not playing.” I push the cards back in front of him.

  “I knew you’d be pissed it was me who figured out how to do this and not you. It says, ‘American couple looking for an apartment to rent.’ ”

  “What’s this?” I ask, pointing at a telephone number at the bottom of a card.

  “It’s the girl’s number. She’s agreed to take messages for me.”

  I think this plan comes with a whole host of problems. One is that anyone we enlist to help us has to have his name checked with headquarters. Second, there’s no way they’d allow some random girl to take messages for us. (And I don’t even want to know what Charlie told this girl we’re doing here.) On the other hand, Charlie’s an operative with a couple of tours behind him, and I have to defer to him. Besides, the way Bob’s running things, there’s no choice but to innovate. We pay our check and go out to look together
.

  Couples seem a lot more innocent than people on their own, especially when they make it look like they’re nesting. Bob’s told us that as soon as we find an apartment, Charlie and I will move in, posing as a couple. We’ll do this for two weeks, alternating operating the parabolic mic. We’ll be replaced by Brad and Lara, the same couple I worked with in Los Angeles. If this thing really takes off, Bob will ask headquarters for other couples to spot us.

  Charlie and I walk along the Miljacka River, noting buildings with a line of sight to the Hizballah safe house. A dozen different places would work. I see a woman coming out of one, and run across the street to catch the door before it closes. Charlie follows me in. The vestibule light switch is only a hole with dangling wires, but the place is clean and smells of cheap soap. I wonder if the building might not be completely abandoned when I hear a kitten’s meow from an upstairs apartment.

  I knock on the first apartment door with windows facing the river while Charlie stands off to the side. A strange girl standing in a door is less threatening than a strange man. I hear something moving in the back of the apartment and knock again. We wait some more, but the apartment is quiet. I put a card under the door, and we walk up to the second floor, footsteps echoing up and down the stairwell.

  The second-floor apartment facing the river is boarded shut. From the dust in front of the door, it’s obvious no one’s been in the place for a long time. I put a card under the door anyway.

  On the third floor we hear the kitten again. It’s coming from the door of the riverside apartment. I can see the tip of its tiny paw under the door. I knock and bend down to play with the kitten’s paw. Just as I am about to slip the paper under the door, the door opens a crack.

  “Can I help you?” a man’s voice asks in English. He leans over to pick up the kitten before it runs out.

  Charlie steps out of the shadow and tells him we’d like to rent an apartment. A gaunt man in his early thirties opens the door wide, looks at us for a beat, and invites us in. “This isn’t what you want,” he says. “But please come in.”

  I walk to the window of the bedroom facing the river. It has an unobstructed view of the Hizballah safe house. The glass is cross-taped to limit shattering, but the tape will come off easily. There’s a smell of moldy carpet. A dark spot in the corner looks like old blood, but maybe that’s just my imagination.

  There is no living room or dining room in the apartment. It was probably subdivided from a larger one. The kitchen and the entrance are the only common areas. Family photos dot the tables and the wall. The man notices me looking at one of a handsome woman in her thirties, wearing a wool coat with a brooch on it. “That was my mother,” he says. I want to ask what happened to her but don’t. It’s a question you never ask in Sarajevo.

  I go back to the bedroom and imagine Serb snipers in the mountains above Sarajevo looking through their scopes at this window. Did they see this man’s mother moving in the window and shoot her?

  A pot of tea starts to whistle on the stove, and our host asks if we’d like a cup. He invites us to sit down on the small couch in the entryway.

  He’s tall and good-looking in a Slavic way, but there’s a sadness in his eyes, a hesitation in his step. His knit sweater is frayed, his pants shiny with wear.

  “I lived here with my parents,” he says. “But it’s only me and my cat now.”

  I play with the kitten while Charlie tells him we’d be interested in the apartment. We would rent it for six months, maybe longer. And we could easily pay the entire rent up front.

  “I am very sorry for my apartment. It is nothing.” Given the way he speaks English, his deliberate enunciation, I wonder if he didn’t once teach it. But I guess that since he’s home in the middle of the day, he doesn’t have a job now. And two Americans offering to rent his apartment has to be a temptation he cannot turn away from.

  “I will live with my sister,” he says, more to himself than us.

  I still want to ask how his mother died, but instead I play with the kitten on my lap. I think about telling him we’ll watch his kitten for him, but it may be all he has left.

  Two days later Charlie and I come back to pick up the keys and pay the rent. The man takes the envelope without looking in it, picks up a small scuffed suitcase, and shakes our hands good-bye. He picks up the kitten, nestling it in the crook of his arm.

  As soon as I hear the front door close, I run down the stairs and watch him walk down the street and disappear around a corner. I never see him again.

  TWENTY

  Indicative signs are:

  disposed boxes used for mine transport

  disposed boxes used for mine trip wire fuses

  holes in the ground from exploded mines and grenades

  the presence of skeletons of dead animals

  —From “Introduction to the Danger of Mines and Unexploded Ordnance,” The Bosnia and Herzegovina Genesis Project

  Sarajevo: BOB

  The landlord of the house where I intend to put my military communicator and Arabic translator comes over and stands behind me to see what I’m looking at. I bend down to examine the basement bedroom floor where it’s been cemented over, waxed, and polished, covering up some sort of a hole. I don’t know why I didn’t see it when I first rented the place.

  “No problem, no problem,” the landlord says.

  I bend down to take a better look. I look up and notice a similar hole in the ceiling, plastered and painted over.

  The landlord motions me aside. “No problem. Look.” He stomps on the hole. “No problem.”

  “It was an artillery shell, wasn’t it?” I ask. “It must have scared you to dig it out.”

  He stamps his foot down on the hole. “See! See!”

  I now realize that the round is still buried in the ground. The concrete and the paint are cosmetic.

  The landlord is afraid I’m about to demand my money back.

  “Is there another one?” I ask.

  “This is the only one. I promise.”

  I know about promises, but I’ve spent a lot of time trying to keep this place clean, and don’t intend to give it up lightly.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “We’ll be fine here.”

  After I rented the house two weeks ago, I made a point of never driving here if I didn’t have to. I didn’t want anyone to start connecting the house to my car. Instead, I walked. I had it timed almost exactly: one hour and ten minutes from the National Library to the house, which sits high up on a ridge above Sarajevo. The route started with a steep run of steps, a traverse through a narrow alley, and a path above a dozen old stone houses cut into the rock. From there, it crossed a field and passed through a grove of birches, which led me to a narrow path through a village. The last leg wound up the mountain on a one-lane road. Anyone following me would have had to be on foot like me, and I couldn’t miss him.

  Only rarely did a car pass me, or did anyone walk the route with me. Sometimes I’d pass children kicking a soccer ball in the road, but they’d ignore me. After the first week of this, I found a way to refine the route, cutting through a cemetery and a pine forest. I was absolutely sure anyone following me would have had to stay glued to my back in order not to lose me.

  On the few occasions when I absolutely had to drive to the house to deliver supplies, I’d drive around for an hour to make sure I didn’t have a tail, taking a new route each time. Halfway up the mountain, I’d take off the license plates. Even if the neighbors noticed me, they could identify the car only by year and model. In other words, this house was as free from scrutiny as they come.

  This may all sound like a lot of hocus-pocus, but as much as cell phones and the automobile enable adultery, they are the Achilles’ heel of spies. Keep your eye on an operative’s car (or tap his phone) and the chances are good you can compromise his sources.

  When I get to the airport, the communicator and Arabic translator are already off the C-130, standing on the tarmac’s edge with their equipm
ent. One’s short, the other tall. They’re both in North Face Gore-tex jackets, cargo pants, and new fawn-colored desert boots—with fourteen enormous hard plastic cases stacked next to them. We can’t fit them all in the car, and have to lash half to the roof.

  On the ride up to the house, neither man says a word. I wonder if they’ve ever worked in the field before. When I stop to take off the plates, they stay in the Toyota.

  Three little girls are playing inside the fence when we pull up to the house.

  “Isn’t that insecure?” asks Ron, the communicator.

  “I don’t know—maybe people will think we’re running a kindergarten,” I say. “It’s better than the truth.”

  “We’re going to have to lock that gate,” he says.

  I take them downstairs into the bedroom and point at the floor where the unexploded shell is. “I think it’s inert. Are you OK with that?”

  They look at me to make sure I’m not joking, then move to a corner to talk so that I can’t hear them.

  “There’s always the Holiday Inn,” I yell over.

  They talk some more and walk back.

  Ron looks anxiously at the Arabic translator, Curtis, whose pencil mustache makes him look like a cat, and asks if we can get it dug out. I say no. They look at each other as if they’re considering running for it.

  For the next fifteen minutes they silently poke around the house, opening closets, looking under beds, opening windows. In the kitchen they look for a moment at the fifteen cases of bottled water I drove up here the week before.

  “Where is the rest?” Ron asks.

  “The deployment order says there have to be twenty-eight cases of water,” Curtis says.

  I tell them I’ll take care of it tomorrow. Of course, I hadn’t read the deployment order—it must have been fifty pages long. I also don’t ask my guests why they think they’ll need so much drinking water. Maybe they think the Serbs are about to put Sarajevo back under siege?