The Company We Keep (18 page)

As soon as I hear the landlady leave, I get up, dress, make my way through the chickens in the backyard, and let myself out the gate. I take a back alley behind a mosque and make my way into town.

The café I stop at is empty except for two men out front playing chess on a gouged board, painted stones standing in for the missing pieces. Neither is much interested in the game. They have to remind each other to make a move.

I pull out a book and try to read. But I’m too distracted to concentrate. I don’t know if it’s because of too much sleep or too much sitting around waiting. I order another coffee and go back to watching the chess players, checking my watch every couple of minutes.

At 9:55 I pay and walk to the synagogue off Vladislava Skarica. My inside officer, Dan, is already there, waiting for me behind the wheel of a new teal Jeep Cherokee. When I get into the passenger’s seat, he pulls away, not saying a word. All that I know about Dan is that he’s only been in the Company five years, he’s the son of an FBI agent, he’s recently divorced, and he gets up early in the morning to work out.

Dan keeps one eye fixed on the rearview mirror to make sure we haven’t picked up a tail. We drive up into the mountains until we come to a restaurant that has a deck with a good view over Sarajevo. I get out to see if the place is open. I shout into the darkness of the restaurant, asking if anyone’s there. A man comes out of the kitchen in a stained apron. I tilt my thumb at my mouth to let him know we want something to drink.

Dan and I sit at a table on the deck, Sarajevo at our feet. I have no idea why, but I say we should order a bottle of wine. Dan just
as stupidly says yeah. The cook understands
vino
, and goes back in to find us a bottle.

I prod Dan for news. He tells me the boss has told him that we should start using different car pickups. He thought I should walk down a road where Dan’s parked on the shoulder, the hood up as if he has engine problems, and we meet by chance.

“He even told me what you should say,” Dan says.

“Let me guess: ‘May I help you?’ ”

“Europe. What do you expect.”

Operatives in Europe have a reputation for leisurely lunches and duty-free BMWs more than they do a spy’s craft.

“What about my Land Rovers?” I ask.

At our last meeting I asked for a couple of armored Land Rovers, camouflaged to look like the British army’s. They’re everywhere in Sarajevo, like yellow cabs in Manhattan. They don’t have license plates, and with their tinted glass, you can’t see into them—perfect for parking and keeping an eye on Hizballah—static surveillance, as it’s called. Or just moving around Sarajevo anonymously.

“They think you’re an idiot.”

“So I’m supposed to drive those fucking cars with advertisements down the side?”

At our last meeting I told Dan about the drive in with the girl who calls herself Riley, who as much as said she wasn’t going to get back in one. Dan looks at me and doesn’t say anything, swishing wine around in his mouth.

“I could see Riley in the turret of a Land Rover,” I say, “manning the thirty-cal. She’s got that certain gleam in her eye. I wonder what her real name is.”

Dan doesn’t answer. He’s been in the Company long enough to have gotten used to false names, how an operative will be known to each of his informants by a different name (an alias), a nom de plume he uses to sign off cables (a pseudonym), and a made-up
name for his informants (a cryptonym). In the CIA, there are even made-up names that stand in for countries, political leaders, and geographic locations. It’s some bizarre nominalism, but it works.

But I’m not going to let the cars go. “Do they want us to ride around on bicycles?”

Dan doesn’t say anything. We’ve run out of things to talk about, and drink in silence. The wine is warm, but I don’t care. All I know right now is that I don’t want to go back to my hovel even if it means drinking all day. What I’ve decided about Sarajevo is that it’s a city radiant with sorrow. Everyone has slipped into a dull acceptance of violence, indifferent to what’s left of their lives. And the one way to combat it is spend your time outside—and drink.

It could be a month before Langley gets the stuff I need here on an airplane. And in the meantime I’ve got people coming to work for me. I dread sitting everyone down and telling them they have to stay in Split until we get our act together. Their enthusiasm is going to fade as fast as mine.

Neither of us realizes how intense the sun is. We’re surprised when we come to the bottom of the bottle. When the cook comes out to check on us, we order another one.

“At least I don’t have a butcher’s bill to pay,” I say.

“What does that mean?” Dan gets up to go look for the bathroom.

I try again to remember what else Dan is supposed to do for me. I pat my pockets to look for a pen, but I don’t have one. Dan comes back, turns his chair away from me to look down at Sarajevo.

“Where’s my satphone?” I ask.

“Have another drink, you drunk.” He half turns in his seat and tops up my glass.

“I need communications.”

“Tomorrow, the next day. I don’t know. Do you have a weapon?”

“When’s the next resupply flight?”

“That’s what I thought.”

I make a circular motion in the air imitating a propeller. “The airplane. The airplane.” I decide I’m drunk.

I think more about how we’re going to have to fly by the seat of our pants, improvise, and keep our fingers crossed that we don’t do something really stupid.

I slide my chair around so Dan has to look at me. “This is goddamned bureaucratic terrorism. We don’t have cars. We don’t have a place to live, and on top of it I don’t have a clue where we’re going to put this damn ray gun.”

In fact it’s not a ray gun. It’s a kind of parabolic microphone that sucks conversations out of the air at a long distance, even through the walls of buildings. My plan is to find an apartment with a line-of-sight view of a Hizballah safe house, position the mic in the apartment’s window so it can’t be seen, and wait for the Hizballah operatives to blurt out something they shouldn’t—a name, an address, or a telephone number. Whatever it is, we run it to ground. For instance, if we were to get the plate number of a Hizballah operative’s car, we would then try to put an owner’s name to it.

I’d like to put blanket coverage even on the Iranians—watch their offices, residences, and cars around the clock. But there’s just no way to do it. First, we don’t have enough people. Second, in a place like Sarajevo the Iranians would spot us in a second and retaliate. Which makes the parabolic mic the silver bullet in this circus. However, with a little luck on our side, in six months we’ll be able to hand European forces a dossier on Hizballah, one they’ll use to unstitch the whole apparatus in a coup de main. That’s my dream at least.

“I would have waited in Split if I were you.” Dan points vaguely in the direction of Split. “There are better bars there.”

I flip him off.

“You moron,” he says.

“Who the fuck are they, sending me out here?” I have a headache. I empty my glass over the rail.

Dan pays, and I go out to the parking lot and get behind the wheel of the Cherokee. But I’m still sober enough to realize I’m too drunk to drive. I climb over the gearshift onto the passenger’s seat.

“How far is Pale?” I ask when Dan comes out to the car.

Pale, a village in the mountains above Sarajevo, is where a handful of notorious Serbian war criminals are holed up. It’s where the winter Olympics were held in 1984. No one will raid it for fear of reigniting the war. We’ve been warned never to set foot in the place.

I don’t say it, but what I have in mind is seeing if Pale’s a good place for Dan and me to meet, somewhere I know the Iranians, Hizballah, and even Muslim Bosnians would never dare set foot in.

“Let’s do it,” Dan says.

“Let’s first go get Cheryl.”

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.

Sarajevo:
DAYNA

I
n 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.