The Company We Keep (15 page)

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.

Washington, D.C.:
BOB

C
oming 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.

Robert sits on the floor and reads a book while Marwan and I talk about Iraq. From time to time Robert looks up to gauge whether we’re finishing or not. I order him an orange juice and a piece of chocolate cake. After it comes, he finds a notebook and a pencil in his knapsack and starts writing. I’ve never seen him take notes before, and tell myself I should ask him about it when we’re back in the car.

The big picture windows are glazed with snow. It melts at the top in rivulets, but then freezes midway down. The waiter comes out to tell us that half of the staff is going home and the lounge is closing. We can move to the dining room if we like. Robert asks whether we shouldn’t leave too.

When Marwan offers to take us to lunch, I take my opportunity to ask Robert if he wants to spend the night here at the hotel. He looks at me hard to see if I’m serious. When he thinks I might be, he says no. I tease him again, saying that tomorrow we’ll rent
cross-country skis and tour around Georgetown. “I want to go home,” he says. “I told Mom I’d come home early.”

I gather up our things, promising to come back and see Marwan after the snow stops and the roads are plowed. Robert is halfway across the lobby as Marwan and I make our way to the front door.

I’m not sure why now, but it just comes out. “I’m going to resign.”

Marwan stops. “You’ve found a new job?”

“Change every once in a while’s a good thing.”

“Come work with me.”

“It would be a pleasure.”

We both understand we’re just making conversation. I can’t work with Marwan because his business is in Iraq, a country under UN embargo. In fact, I have no idea how I’m going to make a living after I leave the CIA.