The Company We Keep (2 page)

Split, Croatia:
DAYNA

I
think Bob’s joking when he points at the station wagon parked out front of Split airport, the one we’re about to drive into Sarajevo. It’s lime green with a tangerine
Orangina
painted down the side. What’s worse, it’s right-hand drive, a British Vauxhall. Bosnia, Croatia—everywhere in the Balkans—is left-hand drive. It just makes no sense to me, driving a billboard on wheels into a city the Serbs have been pounding with artillery and sniping at since the civil war started in 1992. Does he want to give them something to shoot at?

Bob catches my look and asks if it’s a little too early for me. I can’t tell if he means it sarcastically. But it’s only six thirty, and I decide to keep quiet and let him think I’m sleepy. Anyway there’s nothing I can do now. Although I don’t work for him, he outranks me. And that’s not to mention that I don’t have another way to get to Sarajevo.

I tell myself it’ll be fine. We’ll part ways as soon as we get to Sarajevo. But the car does break every rule in the book. From day one, they drilled into our heads never to drive a car people will remember. You drive something plain vanilla, like a dirty, dinged-up brown sedan. People forget plain and ugly things. This station wagon is definitely ugly, but it’s a car no one will ever forget. An ice-cream truck, bells jingling, would attract less attention.

Truth is, I think Bob’s a little nutty. I met him in Sarajevo the first time when Washington cabled us to meet an operative going by the name of Harold. “Harold’s an alias, right?” I asked Charlie, an ex-Marine pilot I work with. We both wondered who’d agree
to an alias like Harold. The only other thing the cable said was that he’d wait for us at eleven at a fish restaurant on the Zeljeznica River, ten miles outside of town.

It was a soft spring day. Small, fluffy clouds drifted across the sky, and the leaves were just coming out. The restaurant was packed with locals drinking and chain smoking. “Riley, Charlie!” a voice called out. It was obviously Harold. He stood up, motioning us to come over, like he was berthing an airliner. He was at a table with a half-dozen men, talking and waving a half-defoliated cigar. Charlie and I didn’t move, so Harold got up, said something to the men that made them laugh, and threaded his way through the tables to join us.

He stuck out his hand. “Hi, I’m Bob,” he said. So much for the Harold alias. We found a free table in the corner. Washington hadn’t told us what we were supposed to do for Bob, only to hear him out. Bob said we should have lunch, and recommended the grilled trout. When we told him we couldn’t stay, he got right to it: headquarters had sent him to Sarajevo to go after Hizballah, the Lebanese militant group backed by Iran. It had set up in Bosnia at the beginning of the civil war to fight with the Bosnian Muslims—at the behest of Iran. “Done right, we’ll pin ’em down like butterflies,” Bob proclaimed.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Charlie concentrating, making sure he’d heard right. I was sure he was thinking the same thing I was: it was Hizballah operatives that were hunting us, rather than the other way around. Three months ago we’d caught Hizballah planning to kidnap, torture, and kill a CIA operative here. We pulled him out in the middle of the night, right before Hizballah’s plan was to be executed. Bottom line: we were playing in Hizballah’s backyard.

Bob must have seen the expression on our faces. “Invisibility,” he said. “We become invisible.”

He talked about the stuff he’d learned in Lebanon during the
civil war—from Hizballah itself, how Hizballah created their own protective covering by constantly moving between houses, changing cars and routes, staying off the telephone and radios, and never patronizing any one establishment exclusively. “Why can’t we do the same?” he said, smiling.

Bob relit his cigar, sending up a fat column of smoke that crouched over the table. The cigar looked Cuban. I wondered where he’d gotten it. Probably in Sarajevo’s black market, where you could find anything from machine guns to stolen cars.

That was pretty much it for the first meeting. I wouldn’t see Bob again until this day: in front of Split airport, leading me toward a car you can see from the surface of the moon. I throw my bag into the back of the station wagon and climb in the passenger side. So much for being invisible, I think.

We start the five-hour drive to Sarajevo not saying a word. Bob breaks the silence by telling me how he’s rented the car from a British former military officer who owns a small travel agency in Sarajevo.

“What does he think you do?” I ask.

“It doesn’t matter. The point is,
he’ll
catch any flak the car draws, not us.”

I nod my head, letting him think he’s convinced me of the logic of it, and we fall into another long silence. As he darts in and out of a British tank convoy, I can’t figure out how he sees to pass.

I wonder about the butter-yellow houses we are passing, with their red tiled roofs. How was it that an incredibly bloody war started in a place like this? These people are modern Europeans, and then one day, I don’t know, sitting around watching a national football championship on Eurovision, they picked up axes and started killing each other, Croats slaughtering Serbs, Serbs slaughtering Bosnian Muslims. Aren’t they all Slavs? And don’t they look alike and speak the same language? It just doesn’t make sense to me. But headquarters doesn’t really care if I know next to
nothing about Bosnia. My job is to surveil the Arab Mujahidin, who showed up here at the beginning of the war. Period.

At Sarajevo’s outskirts I point to a trolley stop, telling Bob I’ll get off here. He shakes my hand, and I watch his lime-green station wagon as it disappears into traffic. I don’t mind when it starts to rain and I reach to pull up the hood of my parka. The fresh air and uncomplicated anonymity feel good.

A week later, headquarters cables that Charlie and I now work for Bob—chasing Hizballah. We’re immediately to cut all contact with the embassy and scatter to different houses and apartments around Sarajevo. Charlie finds his own place, and I’m to move temporarily into the safe house Bob works out of until I can find my own apartment.

Charlie drops me off at a two-story house in a village near the airport, a place called Butmir. The house is overgrown with trees and shrubs. One side faces the “green line”—the confrontation line between Serbs and Muslims. It’s pockmarked by bullets. The fields around the house are bordered by blue tape with little skulls and crossbones—land mines.

Bob comes out of the dark house and grabs my duffel bag. Inside, he gives me a quick tour. The owners fled at the beginning of the war, he says, which explains the thick coating of dust everywhere. The food in the refrigerator is calcified. A couple of the windows are shot out. You can see where a bullet came through a window, ricocheted off the ceiling, knocked over some knickknack on the shelf, and lodged in the wall in the living room. There’s an upstairs bathroom, but the water’s shut off, just as it is to the rest of the village. Bob takes me back downstairs and points at a hose coming through the window of the downstairs laundry room. It’s connected to an irrigation pipe off Igman, the mountain that sits just southwest of Sarajevo. He says the showers wake you
up fast. I turn it on. The water’s icy. The hose is the only way to flush the toilet.

It’s completely dark now. Bob turns on the light, but tells me not to get used to it. The electricity goes off in a half hour, and there’s no generator or flashlights. I say good night, go downstairs to my bedroom, pull the dusty sheets off the bed, and spread out my sleeping bag. As Bob promised, the lights flicker off, and I lie there in the black. Just as I close my eyes, a machine gun fires in the distance, from the direction of the green line. An angry fusillade answers. I sit up expecting Bob to come out of his room. But there’s not a sound. A rocket explodes in the direction of the airport. I wonder if this isn’t the start of something serious, like a Serbian attack on Sarajevo. I don’t hear a sound from Bob’s room, and can only think he’s sleeping through it.

I zip up my sleeping bag. If it isn’t going to bother him, it’s not going to bother me. After an hour the shooting tapers off and stops. The last thing I remember before falling asleep is that I haven’t seen the lime-green station wagon. It seems to have been replaced by an old Toyota Land Cruiser with rust-chewed doors and a cracked windshield. That’s a start.

Damascus, Syria, October 1990:
BOB

W
hen the Lufthansa plane comes to a stop in Syria’s capital, Damascus, half a dozen passengers stand up—German businessmen, I’m guessing, trying their luck at selling the Syrian regime something. The rest of the passengers stay put. They’re on their way to Jordan’s capital, Amman.

Two men in overalls push a rickety stairway across the tarmac. It’s late, and most of the lights are off in the squat terminal. I stay in my seat. I know how slow they are here.

As the stewardess starts to crank open the cabin door, the captain comes over the intercom. “Would everyone please retake their seats, and would Mr. Robert please come forward.”

The Damascus passengers look at each other to make sure they’ve understood, and then sit back down, their cabin bags in their laps. I know what they’re thinking: Damascus is an exotic place and anything’s possible. But it’s not a place where you defy authority.

This is clumsy. They should have met me at Immigration,
pulled me aside. But I hurry down the aisle. In my Levi’s, V-necked sweater, and T-shirt, I don’t look like even a shady businessman. All I can think is that I’m happy Lufthansa wrote down my first name for my last when I boarded in Frankfurt.

A man in a grease-stained blue smock stands at the bottom of the stairs and motions for me to come down and get into his beat-up Syrian Air Peugeot station wagon. I climb into the passenger seat, Mr. Blue Smock behind the wheel. He doesn’t say a word as we slowly round the terminal, pass through a cargo gate held open by two Syrian soldiers, and pull up beside three identical black BMWs. A man standing near the middle car opens the rear door, takes my bag, and I get in. In the backseat is a man I know from Geneva—a friend of Ali, the one who set all this in motion. The man shakes my hand, welcoming me to Damascus. To the driver he says, “
Yallah,
” Arabic for “let’s go.”

It’s a little after midnight.

Once we’re out of the airport, the three BMWs take off. They’ve got to be doing ninety, maybe a hundred. We slow down when we come to Damascus, but then, once past the city center, pick up speed again on the Beirut highway. My Geneva friend doesn’t say anything, and I look out the window at the passing darkness, thinking about the chain of events that got me here.

Ali had once been a Syrian general. Now he’s a very rich businessman with a grand villa above Cannes, a spectacular Geneva mansion, and elegant stopping-off spots all around the world. I’d phoned him out of the blue in Geneva two years earlier, not expecting he’d give me the time of day. Almost ever since, he’s been tutoring me on the nuances of Syria and its secretive president, Hafez al-Asad.

Ali’s own village had been within walking distance of Asad’s. His father knew Asad’s father well. Ali said that unless I understood
these small villages in the Alawite mountains, I could never understand Asad’s Syria. “It’s all relationships, loyalty, trust.”

Only a few days earlier, I’d stopped by Ali’s Geneva place just as the news arrived that the American embassy in Beirut was closing because of a flare-up of fighting in Lebanon—and Syria’s threat to intervene with its army to stop it. Ali sighed, saying a renewal of Lebanon’s civil war was in neither America’s nor Syria’s interest. It was rare that our two countries shared a common interest, he said. This was one such time.

Ali explained to me something I already knew: that the man intent on dragging Lebanon into a new civil war was General Aoun, a Maronite Christian and the former commander of the Lebanese army. As we spoke, Aoun was trying to enlist his fellow Christians in an all-out war against Syria. In particular, Aoun wanted the backing of the commander of the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia. Aoun had told the Lebanese Forces commander that the United States fully backed him. It wasn’t true, but, as I told Ali, there wasn’t anything the United States could do about it now because we no longer had an embassy in Beirut to tell the Lebanese Forces commander differently.