The Company We Keep (4 page)

Ed agrees with me that it doesn’t make any sense. He tells me to bring it up at the next staff meeting with Carol, the agent in charge in Los Angeles. Carol is a pinched woman of few words, and I’ve never really talked with her, but Ed tells me not to worry. He’ll speak up too.

I watch nervously as the twenty or so agents in our office start gathering in the pen. It’s not just Carol I’ve been quiet around. I’ve never said a single word at any of these meetings. Today I stand in the back as usual. Carol walks in, says good morning, and starts in about keeping better track of mileage, auto maintenance, coordinating leave, and some other bureaucratic ministering from Washington. As she gets to the end, I’m even more anxious.

“Any questions?” Carol asks. It’s the way she lowers the boom on every staff meeting—more a dare than a question.

I wait to see if anyone’s going to say anything and then raise my hand, at half-mast. I’m surprised she even sees me. “Yes?” she says. Carol stands up on her toes to see me better.

“Carol, do you think there’s a possibility that cases could be assigned nearer to where we live?” I say. Carol cups her ear as if she can’t hear me. I force myself to raise my voice. “To cut down on driving time?”

Carol’s face is a clenched fist. It’s as if I’d asked her why her shoes don’t match her purse. She turns around without saying a word and goes back to her office. When she reappears ten seconds later, she has a piece of paper rolled up in her hand.

“I don’t see why you are complaining,” she says, sweeping
the room with a gaze rather than looking at me. She unfurls the paper and holds it between her forefinger and her thumb, waving it in my direction. “From what I can see of your caseload, it looks pretty doable to me.”

That’s not what I asked, of course, but I don’t say anything. Instead, I wilt into the fiberboard wall behind me, my face on fire.

Afterward I go into Ed’s office. “I’m sorry I told you to bring it up,” he says. “I guess it’s always been done this way, and it always will be.”

I want to ask him why he didn’t say anything at the meeting, but I let it go. As Lieutenant Escobar says in the great Robert Towne script, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Salé, Morocco:
BOB

V
era, my secretary, is waiting when I come outside, sitting behind the wheel of her Peugeot 505. When she sees me, she flicks her cigarette out the window and waits for me to get in before starting it. She wheels it in a half circle, the tires slithering in the damp sand.

“Which way?” she asks.

I tell her I don’t care. She already knows the routine: she drives me north of the capital, Rabat, and drops me off. The more circuitous the route, the better. The trick is to see whether we’ve picked up a tail or not.

Vera heads north on the beach road, turns right on a road called Tareq el Marsa, and then left on the N-1, the highway to Tangiers. We immediately get stuck behind a file of trucks. She lights a cigarette, rolling down the window to let the smoke out. She asks how far I want to go. I tell her Kenitra, the first big town between Rabat and Tangiers. She doesn’t say anything, but I can tell she’s pissed. It’s bridge night, and now she’s going to miss it.

I’ve always suspected that Vera thinks a spy’s craft is hocus-pocus. Do the Moroccans really care about the CIA that much? I don’t know, but I don’t intend to find out by getting followed to a meeting with an informant.

I slump down in the seat so I can get a better angle on my side mirror. The line of lights behind us is what you usually find on the Tangiers road this time of night—trucks moving when it’s cooler. A car comes out from between the trucks, ducks back to avoid an oncoming truck, and then comes back out to pass. It’s now right on us, flashing its light. Vera moves over a foot and it passes. And then it’s back to only us and the trucks again.

At Kenitra, Vera takes the airport road. She stops by the side of the Oued Sebou, a rotting estuary. I get out, and the stench almost floors me. In the dome light, Vera’s eyes look like they’re frozen open wide. She once told me it was from a cheap face-lift in Bombay. I let her turn around and drive away before I walk back toward Kenitra.

The town’s quiet, a few people cutting through the small streets, shadows on shadows. I take a narrow road that runs parallel to the airport road until I come to the first big street, Beni Hssen, where I start to look for a taxi. A block from the Safir Hotel, I wave one down and open the front passenger door. The driver moves his dinner off the seat and puts it in the back to make room for me. I tell him to take me to Salé, Rabat’s old sister city, which once was ruled by Barbary pirates.

There are fewer trucks on the road back to Rabat, but more
cars. I tell the driver to slow down, and he doesn’t ask why. When we get to Salé, a mile from where this all began, I direct the driver on to Sidi Moussa, then tell him to stop a quarter-mile down the road. I leave the money on the dash, paying him too much so he won’t argue with me. I hurry across the street and walk down a few short steps into Salé’s old city, the medina. With its twisted, narrow alleys, anyone who did not want to lose me would have to keep right on me. I zigzag along a route I know as well as the inhabitants do. I come out on the N-1 side of the medina and cross the road to the Salé train station. The old Fiat’s there in the parking lot where it’s supposed to be. I fumble in my pocket, find the keys, unlock it, and get in. It coughs and starts on the third try.

The beach road is quiet except for couples parked facing the ocean. I park as close to the water as I can, turning the Fiat so the breeze off the Atlantic passes through the open windows.

I pull the Pepsi out of my coat, and a bar of Toblerone chocolate. It’s melted and I lick it off the tinfoil wrapper. The Pepsi is warm. I check my watch. He’s late. I turn the radio on, and listen to an imam extolling the promise of the hereafter.

I don’t see Salah until the door opens, and he climbs in the passenger side.

“
C’est bien passé?
” he asks. Did everything go OK? Salah’s French is good. He went to college, but I don’t remember where.

I tell him next time we’ll meet farther outside of Rabat, but still along the beach

“So what did they say about it?”

“It’s good stuff, you know.”

I can’t see Salah’s face, but I can tell he’s happy. I never had any doubt the cocaine was good, pure. After all, it was for resale.

Salah has a pouch over his shoulder. He pulls a plastic shopping bag out and opens it. In the phosphorescent light off the Atlantic, I can see it’s white, cellophane-wrapped.

“That’s not more, is it?” I ask.

“A half kilo.”

“I told you to stop.”

“It’s from last night’s Caracas flight.”

“They don’t want it.”

I think about telling Salah the truth, about how the cable from headquarters told me to cease and desist—we aren’t authorized to collect intelligence on narcotics in Morocco. And that’s not to mention that no one wants to hear that the king himself is trafficking in it, ferrying tons of coke from Caracas to Casablanca on Royal Air Maroc flights and sending it on to Europe by small airplanes. I decide on a useful lie.

“Salah, we have it covered with someone else. I don’t want you thrown out of a helicopter over the Atlantic for nothing. I need you for more important things.”

And that’s exactly what the palace would do if it caught him spying for the CIA. No one would ever find his body, just one more among the tens of thousands of Moroccans gone missing.

“What do I do with it?” Salah asks.

“Throw it in the ocean when we get done.”

“Then what do you need for me to do?”

“There’s a lot to do. We’ll talk about it at the next meeting.”

But the truth is I don’t know what to do with an informant inside the palace who’s bent on doing something for the United States. In fact, I’m not sure what the CIA is even doing in Morocco. The country’s a backwater. And headquarters is right about the cocaine—it’s not news about the Moroccan royal family and narcotics. They’ve been trafficking hashish out of the Rif mountains in northern Morocco for centuries.

I don’t say anything, and neither does Salah. We both look straight ahead. I think about how Soviet Central Asia is opening up, a place I have to admit really intrigues me.

I joined the CIA in 1976, served mostly in the Middle East, and somewhere along the way became addicted to political upheaval—civil wars, revolutions, coups d’état, armies on the move. I was in Damascus during a failed coup in the early eighties, and then in Khartoum for a successful one. I was in Lebanon during the civil war. There’s nothing more fascinating than seeing a house come down, and the fight to rebuild it.

The chances of anything like this happening in Morocco are zero. In the early seventies, the Moroccan army tried to overthrow the king, but failed. To prevent another attempt, the king eviscerated his army, and so today Morocco is as stable and boring as Switzerland. True, the king is old, but when he dies, it’s a given that his eldest son will succeed him. A state funeral and a coronation are as complicated as it’s ever going to get here.

It seems to me that what my job is about is trying to understand the messy, unpredictable parts of the world and the raw political passions that drive them, the kind that change history. It’s with that in mind I’ve asked for an assignment to Tajikistan, a small ex-Soviet republic nestled up against the borders of Afghanistan and China. There have been stirrings of an Islamic revolution there. I’m also attracted to the place because mountains cover more than 90 percent of it. The roof of the world, as Tajikistan is called. If it doesn’t get too messy, I’ll spend my downtime hiking and skiing in them, my favorite pastimes.

Something else you should know about me is that my marriage is going through a dead spot, and my wife and I have decided to live separately. She and our three children will live in France, where we’ve just bought an old house. The place is pretty much a wreck, but the way it sits in the grapevines on a steep hill, it has real potential. The extra money I make in Tajikistan will go to fixing it up. My wife and I believe that with time and distance, things will work out between us.

On the other hand, I never imagined it would come to this.
When we first met in 1982 in Damascus, Syria, she was a secretary at the embassy, working for the State Department, a real trooper. We both loved Syria and talked about going to more places like it together. But three children quickly followed—two born in Washington, D.C., and the last in Paris—and, well, life changed. Now my onetime would-be partner in seeing the world is completely consumed by them, as any mother would understand. And although she never puts it in these terms, she doesn’t care where I go or what I do. Coincidentally, Tajikistan is what’s called a “separation tour”—spouses and children can’t come along or even visit. It’s too dangerous.