The Company We Keep (8 page)

I walk out of the shoothouse shaking, trying to get my breath. Carlton, a very large African-American instructor who’s helped me all through the course, walks up to me. He’s breathing hard too. He says I’m the last one he would have thought he couldn’t take a Glock from. He shakes my hand. “You’ll do well in a bar fight.”

The last day of the course we sit at our tables cleaning our Glocks. Jeff comes over and tells me to go outside and see Carlton.

Carlton is standing there with a 12-gauge shotgun and a box of shells. He says that if I can keep him from grabbing my weapon, I can do this. He knows I haven’t picked up a shotgun since the day I failed to qualify, and I can only think he’s counting on sheer confidence to get me through it now. I take the shotgun and the box of shells and follow him to the range.

I load three shells and put six in my pocket. Carlton blows his whistle. I take a deep breath, point the shotgun, and squeeze the trigger, evenly and steadily. I fire all three and combat-load three more. I walk up to the fifteen-yard mark and fire three more shells and reload. I walk to the ten-yard mark and “cover the threat.” Carlton blows the whistle a last time, and I fire the last three.

Carlton walks over and looks at the slug holes in the silhouette. “Nice. All center mass.”

I notice Jeff has been watching the whole time, and he walks over.

“I’ve got the first assignment, and it’s yours if you want it,” he says.

I’m sure I’ve misunderstood him. “Excuse me?”

“Ever been to Texas?”

It’s not exactly overseas, but I spend the next ten days in Houston with Jeff and Carlton, guarding the queen and a princess of an Arab royal family. We drive in a motorcade formation, weaving in and out of traffic, blocking cars coming up on our rear. One day I escort the queen and princess to tea at the Ritz Carlton. Another, I shop with the princess for lingerie at Nieman Marcus. I stand behind the queen as she gets her hair blown out, my hand on my back around the Glock. One evening I sew a button on a dress for the princess. I would like to see any of the guys try that.

In the CIA, training never really stops. It seems like I’m in some course every couple of months, either on a range requalifying or blowing something up. But somewhere along the way I realize that all the training is not just about learning how to shoot, but as much about building confidence in yourself, learning things you never thought you could. It’s also about bonding, not a whole lot different from military basic training. They want to see if you can work in a group, follow orders, get along, and think on your feet. It’s all a safe way for them to see who has common sense and who doesn’t. Better to find that out in training than in the field.

I would carry guns overseas when that was what the orders said. But like everyone else I work with, we consider them a liability, a constant worry hanging over your head that you’ll get stopped and searched. And the fact is that without a weapon it’s a lot easier to talk your way out of a tight spot. You just look more innocent.

Anyway, what I end up doing has nothing to do with banging down doors and firefights. The CIA doesn’t try to turn me into some
femme Nikita
. Instead, I join a deep-cover team that travels the globe, trying to stay out of trouble rather than get into it. I know all of this goes against the myth of CIA ninjas roaming
from hot spot to tinderbox, assassinating people and rendering justice. As it almost always is, the truth is a lot blander. The CIA’s rock-cut ethic is never to leave a fingerprint behind, let alone pull the trigger on a gun. The moment a gun comes out, the mission is compromised.

Dushanbe, Tajikistan:
BOB

I
t takes an abscessed tooth for me to find out there isn’t a dental X-ray machine in the entire city of Dushanbe.

“You see, come,” the nurse at Dushanbe’s main hospital says. She motions me to follow her. We walk through dark waiting rooms, corridors, and wards. People stand and lie everywhere, two to a bed, some on filthy blankets on the floor, others squatting against the walls. They’re eerily silent, as if they know the hospital is a place to die rather than be healed. There’s spalling from shrapnel on the wall, blistered paint from a fire. I’d heard about an attack on the hospital last month, and it’s only now that I believe it.

The nurse stops at a small room in front of a hulking X-ray machine. She flips on a switch, but nothing happens. “See. Broke,” she says. She flips the switch up and down in rapid motion. Still nothing.

I point at my tooth, telling her in Tajik again that it really, really hurts. She shrugs and takes me to a waiting room, where I sit on a hard wooden bench next to a young boy who stares at me, a glass eye rolling in its socket.

Half an hour later an Uzbek man in his sixties comes to see me. He tells me he’s a dentist, and has me stand up so he can stare into my mouth. I point below my cheek, where pain radiates like a glowing ember. He reaches into my mouth with his index finger and thumb and starts shaking my lower jaw. It feels like he’s just yanked out my tooth.

“I will pull all these,” he says. He adds that he’s very good at making gold teeth. I believe him; his own mouth is full of them.

He sighs when I say no, looks into my mouth again, and offers to drill around until he finds the abscess. It takes me a moment, but I understand what he’s proposing are three root canals.

I’m about ready to leave when he tells me he has another idea. “A Soviet miracle that will fix our tooth for good.” I know he means
my
tooth. But I’m curious now.

I follow him out the back of the hospital, up an outside stairway, along a catwalk, and into a room furnished with a daybed. He sits me down and leaves. A bleached-blond Russian woman in an apron arrives a few minutes later. She attaches two metal squares on the end of an electrical wire to my lower right gum where I tell her it hurts. She tells me to hold the plates in place and attaches the other end of the wire to an electrical box on the wall with a blinking emerald light.

“
Kharisho,
” she says. Russian for “good.” I notice she too has solid gold grillwork like the dentist’s.

She flips the switch, and a shock runs through my jaw and races around my head as if I’d plugged my nose into an electrical socket. I grip the side of the couch. She stands there watching for ten minutes before unhooking me. My entire face is numb, but not numb enough to know the abscess is still there. I hand her the equivalent of a dollar and leave.

Back at the Oktyabrskaya, I take more antibiotics, but they only dull the pain. I decide seeing a real dentist isn’t to be put off any longer. I can catch a ride on a C-130 to Frankfurt next week. But that means three days of flying. And what if I have to wave off this C-130 too? There’s no way I can wait for the next one. It leaves me with the only other option, a commercial flight to Moscow.

Thirty minutes out of Dushanbe, the pilot announces we’re making an unscheduled stop in Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan. There’s not enough fuel to make it to Moscow, he says. I look down, but I can’t see a runway, only snow. It crosses my mind that an abscessed tooth is going to get me killed.

The plane hits hard, snow billowing in its wake. Before it can turn and taxi to the terminal, we’re surrounded by police cars and fire trucks, forcing the plane to stop. The lady next to me says she’s seen this before—we don’t have permission to land. The Kazakhs don’t trust anyone or anything that has anything to do with Tajikistan. She says we could be here for hours. Resigned that I’m going to miss my dental appointment, I watch a dog wander down the aisle and take a pee on the side of a seat.

I make it to the dentist at the last minute, and he takes care of my tooth. But as soon as I check into my hotel room, the phone rings. It’s Leah, a Russian fixer I’ve cultivated in Dushanbe. She tells me the Dushanbe airport is closed. She doesn’t know whether it’s because of fuel shortages or fighting. Either way, I’m stuck in Moscow.

I have an idea. A while ago I heard from a Russian friend that Leah’s mother was a KGB officer, a general assigned to Moscow. She might know another way to get back to Dushanbe, like a Russian military flight.

“Isn’t your mother in Moscow?” I ask.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Leah says. “I will call you back in an hour.”

She calls back in ten minutes. “Tomorrow, go out to Domodedovo and ask at the Aeroflot freight counter for Natasha. She’s a good friend of my mother’s.”

Domodedovo is Moscow’s domestic airport, which serves Dushanbe.

“But I thought you said there were no flights,” I say, trying to elicit what she has in mind.

“Natasha knows what to do.”

Now I get it. It crosses my mind to ask whether Natasha is her real name or her KGB alias. But even now, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, you don’t talk about the KGB on the phone.

The next day I present myself at the Aeroflot freight counter at Domodedovo. “Natasha?” I ask the squat lady on the other side of the counter. She looks at me uncomprehendingly. “Na-ta-sha,” I say slowly. The woman continues to look at me stupidly, then turns around without saying a word and disappears into the back.

Just as I start to think this is a wasted taxi ride, another lady, with thick rouge and brass hair, appears at the counter in front of me.

“I’m Natasha,” she says. “So?”

I explain that I would like to go to Dushanbe, but there are no planes. She looks at me as if she doesn’t understand a word I’m saying. I decide this must be the wrong Natasha. There could be dozens of Natashas at Domodedovo. I wish I knew Leah’s mother’s name because I definitely would drop it now.

For some reason there’s finally a look of recognition on Natasha’s face. She comes out from behind the counter and leads me to a bench under a set of stairs. “Go sit. I come get you,” she says.

It’s as cold inside the terminal as it is outside. I put on my polar expedition gloves, an extra pair of socks, and a wool watchman’s cap. I’m still cold, so I cover myself with my duffel bag. A blown-out speaker above my head announces arrivals and departures, but there’s nothing about a flight to Dushanbe. For all I know, I’m meant to spend a week waiting here. I lie down and try to catch some sleep.