The Company We Keep

by Robert Baer

  I tell myself that when I have more money I’ll add a bathroom on the second floor. It won’t be fancy—toilet, sink, and shower. The kind of work I do is called bricolage in French. Do-it-yourself. The hard stuff, such as the plumbing, I’ll save for the village plumber, although it will take him months. After an hour or two of work he’ll ask if it’s not time to open a bottle of wine.

  I love the farmhouse, and Burgundy. I was the one who bought it, worked on it, saved money for it, and talked about resigning and living here. But my wife and children came to look at it as purgatory. They always seem to want to be somewhere else. But no one ever says anything, especially the children. Children know instinctively not to question a parent’s dream. I’m sure they’ll sell it as soon as they can.

  The phone in the breakfast room rings at a little after nine. My wife puts the phone in the open window for me to answer. Who could that be? The children stand at the phones, sure it’s their grandmother. My mother calls every weekend when we’re here.

  “Hi.” It’s Riley. “Is it OK to call?” I can tell by her voice that something is wrong, a little catch.

  The children look at me with disappointment when they realize it’s a work call, and run back upstairs to play.

  “They have pictures,” Riley says.

  “Pictures of what?” I ask.

  At first I think Riley is talking about someone taking pictures of the apartment again. But that makes less sense than it did the first time.

  “They said it’s serious,” Riley says.

  “What do you mean?”

  Riley is being elliptical because I told her on the drive across Italy that the French tap my telephone.

  “It’s OK,” I say. “Just tell me. No one here cares about what we’re doing there.” In fact, we and the French are on the same side in the Bosnian conflict.

  Riley pauses for another beat and then says that in Frankfurt the boss pulled her into an office and asked, “Who in the hell is Harold, and why do the Bosnians have pictures of him?”

  It has to be the lieutenant, I think.

  “Apparently he got cold feet,” Riley says, reading my thoughts.

  I understand what’s happened. The lieutenant reported my meeting with him. The pictures must be of the lieutenant and me sitting at the outdoor café. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

  I reassure myself that I didn’t say anything to the lieutenant to let on that I was CIA, and there’s no reason the Bosnians should doubt my cover story that I’m in Bosnia investigating organized crime.

  “Go ahead and drive back to Split and leave the car there,” I finally say. “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Have a good trip.”

  But after we hang up, it all starts to nag at me—the man photographing the apartment, the people looking at the Butmir house, and now the Bosnians knowing about the lieutenant. I don’t know whether they’re connected or not, but if they are, we’ll have to close down the operation and bring everyone home. Or more likely it will be headquarters that will come to that conclusion. It won’t be long.

  Tuesday morning the Bosnian desk chief at Langley calls. “We need to talk to you about something,” she says. Her voice is mechanical, like she’s telling me I’m late on my accounting again. I tell her that I’m due to come back to Washington in a week. She says “they” need to see me tomorrow. I start to ask her what it’s about, but I know it’s the lieutenant. It crosses my mind that she’d like to rub my nose in it, remind me how she’d told me my grand plan wasn’t going to work.

  One convenient thing about the Burgundy house is that it’s a ten-minute drive to Beaune, where I can catch a fast train to Charles de Gaulle airport. In fourteen hours I can make it from my front door to Washington, in time to rent a car and be at headquarters before everyone goes home at the end of the day.

  The next morning the taxi comes before anyone is awake. As I get in, I admire the three shutters I did manage to paint.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Life is being on the wire, everything else is just waiting.

  —Karl Wallenda

  Sarajevo: DAYNA

  There’s no food in the apartment, so Lara and Brad decide to go out for pizza. Because Bob has cautioned us to spend as little time as possible out and about Sarajevo, they drive to Mostar, an ethnic Croatian town thirty minutes away. It’s a little after ten when they finish and start back for Sarajevo.

  They’ve gone only a couple of miles when Brad looks in the mirror and sees a car coming up on them very fast. He moves over to give it room to pass on the left, but instead, the car moves to cut them off on the right. That’s when Lara spots the pistol in the driver’s hand and yells, “Go! Now!” There’s a flash and a sharp crack—a gunshot.

  Brad hits the brakes hard, just as he was taught. The car skids to a stop, as the other car flies past them. Brad keeps the car in first, the engine revving, ready to ram the car if it stops in front of him. But it keeps going. Brad looks over at Lara and sees her holding her stomach, blood pumping out between her fingers. He puts his hand over the bullet hole to stanch the flow and takes off, driving with his free hand. All he can think about is that he has no idea where the hospital in Sarajevo is. If he loses precious minutes looking for it, Lara is going to die.

  There’s not a car on the road, and Brad drives as fast as the old Taurus will go. But it feels like he’s dragging a ball and chain behind him. On Sarajevo’s edge he sees a light in front of him. As he draws closer, he sees it’s a wheeled armored personnel carrier with French tricolors painted on the sides. Brad squeezes the last power out of the car, passes the carrier, and jams the brakes on so the car skids sideways in the road. The carrier stops only inches from the car. Brad grabs an American flag and jumps out of the car, waving it. Lara’s blood is all over him.

  The French help Brad get Lara out of the car and into the carrier. It takes ten minutes for them to get to the French field hospital, where medics wheel Lara into an operating room. Shaking, Brad runs up to the young French soldier on guard duty. Later he remembers grabbing the guy’s lapels, putting his face in his.

  “I’m American. I need you to call the American embassy in Sarajevo right now.”

  After delivering the SUV to Split, I’m on leave in Washington when the phone rings at a little after seven in the morning. A call that early can’t be good news. I recognize the voice, a guy from my office. “Lara’s been shot,” he says. At first it doesn’t register because he’s said it so calmly, as if Lara has caught a cold. “Turn on the news,” he says. Before he hangs up, he tells me I need to go back to Sarajevo on the first flight I can. I’m booking the flight when ABC reports there was a random attack on unnamed Americans in Sarajevo.

  A lot goes through my head. How could this happen? Did the person taking the pictures of our apartment have anything to do with it? I remember that day when Brad came to take over the apartment. I went through the pantry with him, pointing out things I’d found in the market, instant Nescafé, Cheerios, a funky pair of local coffee cups. Brad knew Lara was a clean freak, and laughed at the bottle of Mr. Clean I’d managed to find. She would appreciate that, he said. I said I was sorry I couldn’t do more to spruce up the place.

  When I drove down from Frankfurt with the new SUV, I thought how it would help Lara and Brad to blend in with European military forces who drove SUVs just like this one. It would also be a lot safer than the Taurus Charlie bought. But as these things happen, it was taken by Tuzla, and never made it to Brad and Lara. The SUV’s armor would have stopped the bullet that hit Lara.

  When I get into the office, nothing is any clearer. All they tell me is that Bob is en route to Sarajevo, and that I’m to meet him there. The two of us will clear Lara and Brad’s stuff out of the apartment. The reason it falls on Bob and me is that no one wants to expose someone new to the apartment. If it wasn’t compromised before the shooting, it is now.

  It’s dark, just after
ten, and Bob stands outside keeping watch while I pack up Brad and Lara’s things. I wonder what the owner will think about our leaving like this, with six months’ rent paid up, not even calling to say good-bye. Maybe he’ll move back in with his kitten, which must be a full-grown cat now.

  They agree to meet us the next day on a deserted road with straight reaches in both directions so you can see anyone approaching. The young officer who pulls up alongside is nervous, swiveling his neck around. We put the box of Lara and Brad’s stuff in the trunk, and he drives away without looking back. It’s obvious the operation has gone bad in more ways than one. No one wants to be seen with us. We’re radioactive, and it could be catching.

  I take Bob to his car. “See you at the next war,” he says.

  I wave as he drives away. As I get into my car, I think that the CIA is big and sprawling and it’s possible I may never see him again.

  The French surgeons save Lara’s life, but we never find out for sure who shot her. I doubt we ever will. The simplest explanation is the most likely: the Taurus had a Sarajevo plate, it was driving through a Croat area, and the shooters mistook Brad and Lara for Bosnian Muslims. More stupid sectarian bloodletting. It was a mistake not to have sold the Taurus, or at least changed the plates. Or maybe we just shouldn’t have been going out after dark.

  But I can’t help wondering if there was something more sinister behind it. Maybe we hadn’t been that good—the man who photographed the apartment was part of some setup for an ambush. They followed Brad and Lara from the apartment that night when they went out for pizza and waited for them to come back, and if it had been Charlie and me going for pizza, they would have followed us, too. Luck of the draw.

  With twenty-twenty hindsight, a shooting like this always suggests recklessness, an underestimation of danger. I find myself resisting the idea, and I think it has more to do with a self-defensive psychological mechanism one picks up serving on the ragged edges of the world. You simply can’t interpret every little anomaly in the fabric of your day as a warning sign that must be heeded and acted on. It would lead to panic and paranoia. Soldiers in combat no doubt understand the phenomenon a lot better than CIA agents do.

  Another thing I think most people would be surprised about is that in espionage, few mysteries are ever solved. The CIA is simply too small to comb endlessly through cases that can’t easily be untangled, and whose resolution serves no purpose other than the satisfaction of closure. One just has to let things go. Obsessions end up in paralysis.

  Still, this is a hard one to get over. Lara and I shared a common history. She’d been plucked from the drudgery of Los Angeles, just as I was. Our paths had crisscrossed at any number of unlikely spots, and we had plenty of tales to swap about endless hours on the L.A. freeways. All that counted, but here’s why I think I had so much trouble getting this near miss out of my mind: we predated operational rules, so I knew Lara’s real name.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear, And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear; With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold, A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold; While high overhead, green, yellow, and red, the North Lights swept in bars?—Then you’ve a hunch what the music meant … hunger and night and the stars.

  —Robert Service

  Washington, D.C.: DAYNA

  In the last week of October I’m walking down a hall at Langley when I hear a voice call out, “Riley!” I turn around, and there’s Bob.

  “It’s Dayna,” I say. No point in keeping up aliases now that we’re back at headquarters.

  We chat for a while, and then, out of the blue, Bob invites me to dinner. He says we should catch up on Sarajevo, talk about how we were exonerated over the lieutenant, how Lara is doing. It’s as spontaneous as that. We agree to meet at an Italian restaurant near Tyson’s Corner that night.

  Halfway through dinner, Bob tells me he’s going to Europe to work on his French house and afterward hike in the Alps. Do I want to go hiking with him? I laugh, certain he’s kidding. I tell him it’s a trip he’ll have to make on his own. But at the end of dinner he asks me again, saying he’s absolutely serious.

  I accept, knowing just how wildly impulsive it is. But the truth is, I can be as spontaneous as anyone. If I wasn’t born that way, then these last years I’d spent picking up and flying to the other side of the world at a phone call made me so. When we played hooky and went skiing in Switzerland, it didn’t take all that much convincing on Bob’s part.

  And of course if I hadn’t been in some way attracted to Bob, I never would have said yes. And I guess deep inside I was hoping he felt the same way, or he never would have invited me. Would he?

  Two weeks later, though, as I drive down from Paris, none of this stops me from wondering if I’m a complete idiot. The more I think about it, the more I realize I barely know the guy. What can you know about someone after spending two days in a car with him? It then occurs to me that Bob might just want a hiking companion, nothing more.

  We spend the next four days in Zermatt, hiking from one mountain hut to another. It’s at the end of the season, and there are only a couple of other hikers on the trails. Those three days are like a forced march. My boots are too small and I lose a toenail. Dinners in the huts are basic: a bowl of soup and fresh brown bread. There are no showers or baths. The people who run the huts assume we’re a couple, and must think it strange when Bob asks for two rooms. Still, at night I lie in bed looking forward to the next day.

  One night over dinner, Bob tells me a story about how a friend of his used to take a long, hard trip in a small car with a prospective girlfriend before deciding if they were compatible or not. He’d know before the first thousand miles. I don’t say anything, but I think he’s talking about us.

  The last morning it’s drizzling, and we buy ponchos. The ground is slippery, but the Swiss, in their meticulousness, have spread sharp crushed rock on the trails. By midday the drizzle turns into a steady, icy black rain, and we turn back for Zermatt. I want to stay inside and get dry, but Bob talks me into a tram ride to the bottom of the Little Matterhorn.

  We walk out of the tram station to be met by a driving blizzard. A few hardcore skiers ride up a little T-bar nearby. Bob says we should take a quick hike to the top of the Little Matterhorn. It isn’t all that far, he says, and he’s brought his ice ax. We start out, but when I look back and can’t see the station, I tell him he’s out of his mind. He cheerfully agrees, and we go back. As a compromise, we walk back to Zermatt and stop for beers at the first place on the way down.

  As much as you can know about these things, I realize on that walk down that I’ve fallen in love. The two of us will never have much money or even a lot of stability, but right now neither seems to matter. All I can think of is that Bob has a way of throwing open the windows and doors of my life. With him, things will never be predictable or boring. And not being bored counts a lot with me.

  When we come back to Washington, we move in together at the Wolf Trap Motel in Vienna, Virginia. We buy two bicycles, chaining them to the balcony outside our room. On dry days we ride them to work. Two months later we upgrade, renting a one-bedroom apartment a block off Connecticut Avenue in Washington. We take the Metro to work.

  I beg my boss not to deploy me, and can’t thank him enough when he finds me a desk job. I laugh at myself, thinking how there was a time I kept a suitcase packed in my closet and would go anywhere at a moment’s notice. You need me in Kingston tomorrow? No problem. But now, for the first time in all these years, I no longer want to get on an airplane to go anywhere.

  In the summer I’m offered a slot in the operations course at the Farm—the CIA’s secret training facility in rural Virginia. It’s the first step to becoming an operative, something I’ve dreamed about for a long time. Not only will a lot more jobs open up to me, but I’d be qualified to run inform
ants, and even learn a hard language. I’d accept on the spot if it weren’t for Bob.

  Normally the two of us could probably take a “tandem” assignment, a posting to the same place. But the reality is that finding two jobs in the same overseas station is nearly impossible. There’s the added complication that Bob eventually received a citation and a medal for his work in Iraq, and if he sticks to the straight and narrow, he’ll land another station where he’ll be chief. But the way the rules are written, a wife or husband can’t work for a spouse. We’d be lucky to work in adjoining countries. Meanwhile, the pressure would be on me to take an overseas assignment apart from Bob.

  I know the way these things go. After the Farm I could drag my feet for a while, turning down one posting after another. Inevitably, though, the day would come when I’d have to say yes. At first it would be something like a three-month assignment, and then six months, and eventually a full two-year tour. Soon enough, Bob and I would be leading separate lives.

  Also making me hesitate to go down that path is that I can’t see myself doing this forever and risk ending up like Cheri, my friend in the shooting course. I don’t want to become some Flying Dutchman, driven around the world by whatever random wind that comes along. And it pretty much would stay that way until I retired. I know that one day I’ll want to settle down, in a place where, I don’t know, a kitten can grow old. Maybe not right now, but one day.

  For Bob, the solution is for the two of us to resign and make a life together on the outside. He wants to reboot in Beirut, a city he fell in love with when he worked there in the 1980s. I like the idea of Beirut too, but frankly I dread giving up something very important in my life. Bob’s had a full, fascinating career in the CIA, and he saw a lot more of the world than I did. I’ve only put a handful of years, and my star now is on the rise. So, in the end, I hedge my bets and take a leave of absence.