The Company We Keep (14 page)

“It sounds like Tajikistan,” Yuri says.

I have to wonder if it is a good idea to expose Yuri to my life and a Los Angeles ghetto shoot-out. But my read of Yuri is that if money doesn’t interest him, then the truth does. And the truth I’m trying to convince him of is that he can’t risk letting his daughters grow up in Tajikistan’s violence and corruption. I want him to come to the conclusion that he needs to make a bargain with the devil, spy
for the CIA to pay for Clemson. I’m counting on the briefings in Washington to push him over the edge.

Yuri isn’t allowed in CIA buildings, so I rent two suites at the Sheraton at Tysons Corner. There, over the next two days, headquarters parades through a dozen specialists on Afghanistan, Russia, and Iran. It’s a chorus of grim news. The Taliban’s about to take over Afghanistan, chaos will migrate across the border into Tajikistan, Russia’s too weak to hold it back, Iran’s on the rise.

I’ve arranged the crucial briefing for last, about heroin smuggling. I already know the analyst will tell Yuri that commerce in the drug could very well bring Tajikistan down. I also know it’s a message Yuri will listen to. He’s told me before how heroin smugglers torture KGB officers by cutting off the tips of their fingers, and then keep cutting until they die from a loss of blood. Afterward, the smugglers throw the corpses, chopped up in a grain sack, on their families’ front steps. Fear, I hope, will drive Yuri into the CIA’s arms.

There’s a knock at the door, the narcotics briefer. I let him in. He’s a man I’ve seen around headquarters, but I can’t remember his name. The man walks across the room to shake Yuri’s hand. “Hi, I’m Rick Ames.”

I go downstairs to make a call, while Ames gives Yuri the bad news about heroin.

Several months after I’m back in Dushanbe, my communicator hands me a cable from headquarters: The FBI’s just arrested Aldrich “Rick” Ames for spying for Russia, betraying a dozen sources in Moscow, including KGB officers.

Yuri calls the same day the Ames arrest is reported in Moscow newspapers. “Did you hear?”

I pretend I don’t know what he’s talking about.

“The CIA man arrested,” he says. I can hear the strain in his voice. “I know him.”

“It’s very unfortunate.”

“Isn’t he the one I met?” Yuri asks.

“Yes,” I answer, with my head in my hands. If there were a hole nearby, I might climb in it and pull the dirt on top of me.

Yuri hangs up.

Shortly after Ames saw Yuri, Ames went to his last meeting with his Russian KGB handlers. Ames told them about Yuri, and about my intention to recruit him, and the KGB decided it couldn’t take any chances. Although Yuri never betrayed a secret or ever intimated he would, he was recalled to Moscow and lost his job the following week. Langley knew about Ames and must have suspected he’d burn Yuri, but they never told me about the Ames mole hunt before his arrest, or tried to wave me away from having Ames and Yuri meet. Yuri was just a throwaway in the deal, but I suppose I should talk. I’d used my own mother to try to recruit someone who might have been a friend—if I knew for certain what that means.

Nicosia, Cyprus:
DAYNA

I
sit on the floor in a bathing suit, my back propped up against a cheap futon, sweat dripping off my face. It’s only ten in the morning and already over ninety degrees. There’s not a sound from the street, the Cypriots having fled to the beaches.

I pick up the muff earphones and listen to the static. It’s just the usual forty-eight volts DC running down the line. I haven’t heard the guy whose apartment we’ve wired for sound in the last twenty-four hours. I wonder if he’s away.

I unplug the earphones and turn up the recorder enough to hear it in the kitchen while I make my second cup of coffee. I watch the kettle for a while and then lean over the sink to look out the window. At just the right angle, I can see his apartment. But his windows are closed, and I can’t see in.

I’ve never seen the guy in person, although I’ve seen his photos. Someone else rented the apartment directly across the street so
they had a full-face view when he came out his front door. He’s a lanky, good-looking guy with dark hair and boyish features—nothing remarkable about him one way or the other. The fact is, he could pass as one of us in his scruffy chinos and knit polo shirts, and sometimes a fisherman’s cap. In the photos it’s all so nonchalant that it’s hard to imagine he’s a murderer.

The water boils, and I mix it with the last of my instant coffee. I’m going to have to go shopping. I remind myself that I don’t want to forget anything and have to go out in the heat a second time. I look for a piece of paper and a pen to make a list. I’m also going to pass by the Europa Hotel. Maybe they’ve received some new magazines. I’d read about anything to get me through the rest of the day.

I try not to go out so much anymore. Last week when I was in Cyprus’s second largest city, Limassol, I was parked only five minutes when a cop pulled up behind me. He got out and tapped on my window. The cop said something on his radio, then bent down to take a look around the inside of my car. I had a map on the passenger seat. Didn’t I look like a tourist? He asked me if I’d accompany him back to the station. I didn’t have a choice. There, he wrote down my name and passport number, and asked why I was in Cyprus. When I told him I was a film scout, he absorbed the information without comment. I expected he’d ask what studio I worked for or something. (I had a story for that.) But he didn’t, and he let me go. Anyhow, it spooked me, and now I try to spend the least time I need to on the street.

Two days later something else weird happened. I was coming down the elevator of the Europa Hotel when it stopped to let someone in. I recognized the guy right away, a teaching assistant I’d known at Berkeley and a former Olympic swimmer. He held his head to one side, recognizing me. “Dayna?” Dayna is not the name I’m using here, and I panicked a little, but we were the only ones on the elevator. We got off at the lobby, and I had no choice
but to talk to him. He told me he was in Cyprus working for Gatorade, although he normally lives in Holland. When he asked what I was doing here, I told him my cover story, film scouting. He nodded his head as if it made perfect sense. He gave me his card. I told him I didn’t have one, but promised to get in touch when I was back in California. Fortunately, he was on his way to the airport and there was no more time to talk.

I can’t decide what’s flimsier—my using this film-scout cover, his working for Gatorade and living in Holland, or the crazy coincidence of running into someone from a past life in an out-of-the-way place like Nicosia. I don’t know why, but it made me think about my last conversation with my husband. When I asked him what was going to happen to us, he didn’t say anything right away, but finally said he guessed we’d just go along until one of us met someone else.

I sit back down against the futon with my coffee, and try to get into an old Italian
Vogue
. I put it down to listen to a noise in the hall, a door slamming and then a crying baby. It sounds like the neighbors are fighting again. I pick up the headphones to make sure the sound is still working.

It’s two months now, and I still don’t really have a good feel for the guy. All they told me about him was that he was behind a handful of political assassinations in Turkey. But you couldn’t tell it from eavesdropping on him.

One time he called a taxi company three times, complaining about his car not coming on time. He kept calm, and if he was angry it was pretty restrained. Another time he called a woman. He was playful at first, and I thought for a minute it was a girlfriend. But the conversation turned serious, and I doubted there was anything going on between them.

Now he’s gone silent, and I’m left wondering what anyone would learn by eavesdropping on me. I never call from the apartment phone. If anyone were listening to it, they no doubt would
decide that I’m some sort of shut-in with no friends or family. And even if I could call home, what would I say? I spend my days spying on a terrorist. Nothing could be more foreign to my self-made engineer father or my homemaker mother. My dad thinks I work for the military, while my mother believes my paycheck comes from an international moving company. But I wonder how grounded any of us really is. Aren’t we all some sort of phantom, not a whole lot different from the guy I’m eavesdropping on?

By two, I’m bored beyond endurance. I’ve got to get out. I turn the recorder’s volume off and slide it into the concealment panel in the TV console, push it until it clicks closed, lock the windows, and quietly let myself out the apartment’s door.

A couple of tourists are on the main street, Makariou, but the shops are all closed for the afternoon. I follow my usual route into the old city, passing through the old Venetian walls, cutting down a small alley that winds under latticed wooden balconies. In some places the sandstone walls are so close you can touch the houses on either side by raising your hands. I stop to smell the jasmine and bougainvillea from gardens I can’t see. An old woman in black comes out of a door and dumps a bucket of dirty water into the street.

I take a left on the first street I come to, Artemidos, and walk down to the “blue line”—a UN-mandated separation line that divides the Turkish half of Cyprus from the Greek. I glance at the minaret of the mosque just on the other side, and then stop as I usually do to study a plywood board with pictures of missing people. No one new has been added.

On the way back, I make my usual stop at the little Greek Orthodox church on Stasinou Street. I don’t know why, but recently I’ve started lighting candles for the missing. I light one now and sit in a pew in the dark, cool silence until a man comes in. He’s young, in his twenties. I watch him as he lights a candle, putting it near mine. At first I think he’s followed me here. But then he crosses himself and leaves.

When I come out, it’s a lot cooler, and the shops are opening up. I stop at the gyro stand where they know me. A young boy who works there likes to practice his English. I order the same thing every day, and he starts making it when he sees me come in the door.

My final stop is the corner market. Back in the apartment, I put the things away in the kitchen and take a bottle of water out of the refrigerator. I take the recorder out and put on the earphones. I’m startled to hear two voices. Our guy is angry, the other defensive.

“You said that last time,” our guy says.

“Yes,” the other voice says. “But the envelopes are ready now.” It’s someone I’ve never heard before; his English is halting, searching for words, as if he learned it in school and never had a chance to practice.

“I need to see them now,” our guy says.

“Tomorrow, maybe?”

“No, let’s go now.”

There’s never been anything like this before. I quickly put the recorder back in the concealment panel and slam it shut, harder than I intended. I grab my cell phone and a wide-brimmed straw hat, even though it’s dusk. I let myself back out and clatter down the steps into the street. I’m not sure exactly what I’ll do. See the two meet and then follow the unknown voice home to see where he lives?

As soon as I step out of the apartment doorway and go around the corner, I catch sight of our guy walking down Makariou, alone. It’s not even a decision—I follow him. I take note of what he’s wearing, a bluish polo shirt and jeans. They are clothes easy to lose sight of at this time of the evening, so I’ll have to stay a little closer to him than I normally would.

He stays on the same side of the street and then stops abruptly in front of a store window. I slow down and watch him as he pats his jacket. He finds what he’s looking for, his cigarettes, and pulls one out to light it. He takes a deep drag, tilting his head back, exhaling up into the air.

He continues toward the old city, with me twenty paces behind him. By now I know every street and alley here. And that’s what worries me. It’s a labyrinth, and to follow someone you need dozens of people with radios. There’s nothing I can do about it since I’m on my own. But I call my team leader to let him know.

“Hey, I’m with our guy,” I say as soon as he picks up. “He’s going to meet somebody.”

I sense he’s excited. “Stay with him as long as you can.”

I hold back and keep my eyes on his shirt. I lose it for a second when he walks around a newspaper kiosk, and see too late that he’s stopped on the other side, reading a newspaper clipped to its corrugated roof. There’s no place to duck into, so I take out my cell phone again and pretend to dial, looking at the ground. If he notices me, he doesn’t show it. He buys a newspaper, rolls it up in one hand, and taps the other with it.