The Company We Keep (17 page)

Even Tok gets bored driving around Almaty. “Good, no?” he says. “Now we have lunch.” Although it’s only ten thirty and we’ve just finished breakfast, neither Garth nor I say anything.

Frankly, an early lunch sounds good. It’s been a long week. It all started at Dulles Airport’s private jet terminal where we boarded the Director’s ultra-tricked-out Falcon 7X. It quickly turned into a liquor-smeared blur: Guinness most of the night in Prestwick, Scotland; endless vodka toasts in Baku, Azerbaijan; vodka for breakfast in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan; and bottles and bottles of cognac in Tashkent, Uzbekistan; countless lunches, dinners, receptions. I started pouring my glasses into the potted plants as I’d seen Tajikistan’s president do, but now I have a pretty good idea what it’s like to go on a bender.

We’re traveling the region, discussing how we can improve relations with our counterparts in the Caucasus and Central Asia, which usually means writing checks for one thing or another. We’re supposed to get intelligence in return, but more often than not the money drops down a black hole. We’re also on a farewell trip for Garth, who’s going to retire in two months. As for me, I’m along for the ride—anything to escape Langley.

Tok drives up into the mountains, every once and a while turning on the siren to bully cars out of our way. For a while I think he’s taking us on a long drive far out of Almaty, and my mood blackens. Then I hear Tok tell Garth we’re going to Chimbulak, a ski resort above Almaty, and I feel better again. Maybe’s there’s a good restaurant there.

We’re almost there when Tok abruptly yanks the wheel hard right, plowing the Suburban into a snowfield. The momentum
carries the Suburban about five feet before it sinks to its windows. Tok gasses it, but the wheels only spin. A dozen soldiers appear out of nowhere, tumbling over the snow, swarming the Suburban, putting their shoulders in it to try to get us unstuck, but it doesn’t budge. “No matter,” Tok says. “We walk.”

The soldiers dig out the doors so we can open them, and then stomp down the snow, making a path to a banquet table in the middle of the field. It’s piled high with liquor bottles and platters of food. My shoes are instantly soaked, my feet freezing. I’m resigned to another very long day.

Tok barks something in Kazakh, and a soldier runs to the table, going down face-first in the snow a couple of times. He comes back with three glasses and a bottle of brandy. Tok fills up our glasses. “Oh, why the hell not,” Garth says, finishing his brandy in one gulp. I follow suit, hoping it will take the bite off the cold.

Tok looks over my shoulder. “Now, sportsmen, we have fun.” I turn around to see a soldier with an armful of skis, boots, and poles.

Garth sees what’s happening. “You know, Tok, I think I would rather stay here with you,” he says. “We have a lot to talk about.”

I look at the banquet table, the dozen or more brandy and vodka bottles waiting there, and grab a pair of boots from the soldier. “I’d love to ski,” I say.

Two of Tok’s soldiers try to keep up with me by running under the lift. But the snow is too soft, and they fall behind. I’m halfway up before I notice my skis are different lengths. If anyone notices I’m skiing in a suit, they’re too polite to say anything.

By the second run, my feet are killing me. I ski to the bottom and trek across the field to the banquet table. Tok meets me with a tumbler of something brownish. “The President’s own cognac,” he says, handing me a glass. “A toast to you, a great American ski champion,” Tok says. He downs his. I take a sip. Tok frowns, and I throw back the tumbler.

I take the skis off and look for something to eat, knowing that the only way to get through the rest of the doomed day is on a full stomach. I find a plateful of pieces of something white, greasy, and pulpy. I ask Garth what it is. “Raw horse mane,” he says. “It’s exquisite, try some.” I put it down and pick up another plate of something. “Oh that’s delightful too,” Garth says. “Sun-dried horse rectum.” He giggles. Garth is already drunk. I grab a handful of radishes.

It’s getting very cold, which at least keeps me sober—or maybe not, because I seem to have missed the fact that everyone else is heading back to the Suburban, which has been miraculously turned around. When I finally catch up, I ask Garth where we’re going. “Do you know how to skate too?” he asks.

At Almaty’s gigantic skating rink, we follow Tok down a set of stairs into a lighted corridor. Tok opens a door to reveal a stump of a woman with arms of steel. She’s holding a bundle of birch sticks. “Now we take bath,” Tok says. Tok doesn’t mind when Garth and I say no. He tells the woman to bring us a bottle of vodka and glasses instead, and when she comes back, we toast eternal Kazakh-American friendship.

By now I’m on my way to being good and drunk. We follow Tok farther into the guts of the rink, down a dark maze of corridors and offices. I’m completely disoriented. People come out and shake Tok’s hand. Everyone seems to know him.

At last we end up in a gloomy, windowless, private dining room with gaudily painted Styrofoam rocks attached to the walls. I think it’s supposed to look like a grotto. One of the tables is set with a dozen vodka bottles. Tok opens one and pours us shots. A couple of men wander in, Russians and Kazakhs. Tok pours them vodkas too.

A woman appears with a giant platter of broiled carp ringed by potatoes. Everyone wolfs the food down, stopping only long enough to make toasts. Tok drinks along with the rest of us. So far
I haven’t caught him emptying his glass under the table, but he’s stone-cold sober as far as I can tell.

When we’re finished, Tok takes the free chair next to Garth and throws an arm around him. “Mr. Garth,” he says, “it is time that we enjoy ourselves as men.”

“What?” Garth says, his eyes alert now. It’s probably my imagination, but I think Garth is willing himself sober.

“Ladies. Beautiful ladies.”

On cue, two very attractive girls in their twenties come floating in, accompanied by a recording of Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York.”

Garth looks as if he’s going to throw up, but then roars with laughter. He stands up and puts his arm around Tok and pulls him in for a hug. “God, I love you Tok. Thirty-five years in the CIA, and no one has ever offered me a girl. I’ll have to say no, but it truly is a wonderful offer.”

The next morning, as we board the Falcon for London, I tell Garth that we should have invited the girls to come along. I sort of like the idea of getting thrown out of the CIA for ferrying two hookers on the Director’s plane, if nothing else than to see the expressions on the faces of Her Majesty’s immigrations at Heathrow airport.

In fact, how to get out of the CIA occupies more and more of my mental energy these days, and Garth knows it. It’s part of why he has invited me along on his farewell tour. It’s not only that we’re pals, or that I’ve done time in many of the places we have been visiting, or that I can generally be counted on to do stupid things like barreling down a slope in mismatched skis and my meet-the-president suit. He wants to see how I handle myself in polite company, see if when I resign from the CIA, maybe we can work together.

Garth and I both know there’s a big, endlessly fascinating world outside the precincts of the CIA, a place with lots of possibilities. It’s a world we’ve convinced ourselves we could get along in very well, looking up old friends like Tok. We might even be able to make a good living at it.

Here’s what I need to do before I pull the plug though: get the FBI off my back, divorce, and take one last bite of the cherry.

Sarajevo:
BOB

I
sit on the bed, listening to the landlady move around in the kitchen. I start to get up, but then decide I don’t want to see her. Our impromptu Serbo-Croatian lessons are going nowhere, she bustling around the kitchen, pointing at things, giving them names, and me repeating after her like a parrot with a bad accent.

I keep reminding myself it’s okay not to mingle with the Bosnians or learn their language. I came to Sarajevo for only one reason—to take my Parthian shot at the Iranians and their proxies Hizballah, my last hurrah before I leave the Company. And
to do that I need anonymity. Mixing with the locals can only end up “eroding my cover”—CIA speak for the enemy smelling a rat. And, if I know Hizballah, they’ll be a lot faster to smell one than the Bosnians.

Hizballah operatives and their Iranian backers are great spies and saboteurs, some of the best. They have been ever since they launched their undeclared war on the United States during Khomeini’s revolution in 1979. I watched from the front lines as the Iranians won every skirmish we ever fought with them. They got away cleanly with taking our diplomats in Tehran in 1979, turned a rescue mission into a fiasco, blew up our embassies in Beirut and Kuwait, and kidnapped and killed our chief of station in Beirut. In Kuwait, they shot one of my best Hizballah informants point-blank in the face. In all of it, they never left a fingerprint behind.

And it’s definitely not going to help that in Sarajevo the Bosnian Muslim government is a client of Iran. The Bosnians haven’t forgotten that it was Iran that came to their aid when the Serbs had them under siege, sending money, food, and arms while the West turned a blind eye to the slaughter. If it’s a choice between the CIA and the Iranians, they’ll take the Iranians any day.

Finally, there’s the added problem that Sarajevo is just plain small. It took me one day of walking around to realize that there’s nowhere to go—no place to kill time or blend in with the locals. The only important landmark, the old National Library, is a burned-out husk. There’s the Holiday Inn, where you can get a drink in the lobby bar, but it’s almost always empty and gloomy. Operating in this place is going to be like swimming in a straitjacket.

I’ve picked this apartment with the chatty landlady because it’s off the grid and out of Hizballah’s sights. I didn’t have to sign a lease or show an ID or a reference. The alternative was the Holiday Inn, where most foreigners stay. But it’s a spy’s trap because
the desk clerks, maids, and everyone else report to Bosnian intelligence. And all the rooms are bugged too. If I stayed there it would be a matter of days before my presence filtered up to Hizballah.