The Company We Keep (5 page)

Los Angeles:
DAYNA

O
ne morning I’m at my desk, planning my day with the Thomas Guide close at hand, when I look up to see Carol standing over me. “You got a second?” she asks. She’s looking more irritated than usual. As I follow her into her office, I search my mind for what I could have done wrong.

“Close the door,” she says.

I sit down.

She picks up a cable from her desk and reads it silently as if seeing it for the first time. “If you don’t want to do this,” she says, “just tell them no.” She hands me the cable with two fingers, as if
it were a dirty Kleenex. Before I can even start reading, she says, “You know you’d have to leave L.A.”

I read the first line and my heart starts to race. It’s from headquarters, asking if I want to go to the CIA’s basic training for bodyguards and shooters—six months of grueling day-and-night drilling in pistols, shotguns, automatic weapons, hand-to-hand combat, high-speed driving, killing someone by shoving a pencil up through their hard palate. It’s all the guys in the office can talk about, and what most of them joined the CIA for in the first place. At the end it means a posting to Washington, along with a lot of travel overseas. Unlike the FBI, the CIA is all about going overseas.

I understand what Carol’s getting at when she says I’d have to leave L.A. I’m married, and the job that comes out of this course won’t be the kind where a spouse can exactly tag along. And even if my husband could, I know mine wouldn’t. He’s a municipal court judge, not exactly a portable job. In other words, I’ll either be going alone or not at all.

Carol taps her desk with the eraser end of a pencil to get my attention. I’m about to ask “Why me?” when Carol answers the question herself.

“We nominated you because
they
asked us to nominate another woman from this office. Do you want it or don’t you?”

The other woman Carol is talking about is Lara, who went to the same course last year. A tough, energetic blonde, Lara met her husband, Brad, in the L.A. office. She took Brad with her when she left. Since they both worked for the CIA, it made perfect sense. But that didn’t stop Carol from complaining about losing them.

I take a quick glance around at the scuffed brown Formica tables, the mismatched chairs, the dusty Wang computers, the IBM Selectric typewriters, the shabby carpets, the piles of telephone books, the tattered maps on the bookshelves, the grimy windows
that look down on an auto mall.
Yeah, I want it
, I think.
I want it very badly
.

I’m not about to say this to Carol, but I wonder if I can really do this. The only time I held a real gun was when I first went to Washington right after the CIA hired me. They took us out to a range and had us fire at a target. But no one cared if we hit it or not.

“Well?” Carol says.

I try to hide my excitement, not sure she doesn’t have some way to spike it, out of spite or something. Who knows what she would do not to lose another agent?

Just as Carol reaches to take back the cable, I pull it back. “Yes. I’ll do it.”

I leave early, walking out into the gray-glazed sun, looking for my government sedan parked in among the discounted Toyota Corollas, overflow inventory from the dealer next door. I’m still trying not to think about what it means for my marriage and how unfair it is that I got the training instead of one of the guys. Instead, I wonder whose idea it was to put us at the back of an auto mall. I guess something to do with hiding behind bleak anonymity.

I get home before my husband. I put my briefcase down and go out in the backyard to feed my two turtles. As soon as they hear me, they come out from behind their pond and waddle over. I have lettuce for them.

There’s almost a view of the ocean from here. If you walk a block toward the beach you can see sailboats coming back down the channel at the end of the day. At night you can hear the bell buoy and the seals barking. It’s six blocks from my parents’ house, and a five-minute walk to the yacht club where my husband and I
first met. It’s a beautiful house, one my husband owned before we married.

Corona del Mar is the only home I’ve ever known, a magical place. I grew up on the water, racing up and down the Balboa Channel in my seven-foot Sabot sailboat, darting between the moored boats, sitting on the docks eating lunch with my friends, our feet dangling in the water. By high school, if we weren’t sailing or in school, we were hanging out at Lifeguard Station Number 5, across the jetty from the Wedge, maybe the best bodysurfing beach in the world.

My husband spent most of his life here too, and we share a lot of friends from before our marriage. He loves to golf, and spend his vacations close to home, usually in Palm Springs. He’s always told me he’ll never move; it’s just too nice here.

I myself could see settling down in this place, at least when I’m older. But frankly, life right now feels a little too scripted, too predictable, and, well, maybe just a little too comfortable. Every time I walk up to Albertson’s, the grocery store on the Pacific Coast Highway, and talk to the checkers—many of whom I went to high school with—I’m reminded of how self-contained the world I live in is. I know there has to be more out there.

When I was at graduate school at UCLA, I interned as a social worker counseling gang members locked up in juvenile hall. Their childhoods were a nightmare of abandonment and hopelessness, and many were in for rape and murder. One was only eight. Another told me how his father had punished him by attaching jumper cables to his nipples. Like people who slow down to look at a car wreck, I was transfixed, and reminded of something I should have known a long time ago: not everyone grows up as comfortably as I did. What else didn’t I know?

I’m not sure what I imagined when I first picked up a CIA application at the job fair at UCLA. Working in some exotic foreign place where the dogs bark all night and the moon is always full?
Well, I wasn’t
that
romantic. But I did think of CIA work as intriguing, maybe even vital. At the very least, I expected a world less tidy and confined.

But working for the CIA in Los Angeles turns out to be all about looking into lives that aren’t a whole lot different from mine. It’s like boarding a bus expecting to wake up in a new city, but instead making it only to the end of the block.

When my husband comes home, I wait until he gets his drink and sits down in the lawn chair where he likes to read. I sit in the chair next to him, pick up a magazine, and then put it down.

“They offered me a new job,” I finally say.

He looks over at me. “That’s interesting.”

As I tell him what I can about the course, he listens, nodding his head. Every once and a while he stirs his scotch with his finger.

At one point I pause to see if he wants to ask me anything. But he only keeps looking at me, waiting for me to finish. I don’t know what I want him to say. Tell me not to go and stay here with him?

He smiles when I’m finished. “That’s fabulous.” I can tell he’s genuinely excited for me.

“Maybe I should just go to law school here,” I say. It’s something I’ve thought about for a while.

“Trust me, you don’t want to go to law school, and besides, you’d be miserable to live with.”

I finally get out what’s been nagging at me since I found out about the course this morning. “It would mean I’d be based in Washington.”

He laughs, good-naturedly. “Well, I can visit, right?”

Dushanbe, Tajikistan:
BOB

B
eware of what you wish for. It’s a little after nine when a friend with the UN knocks at my door, breathless. “There’s been an attack on the airport,” he says. “A bad one.”

I immediately call up a contact at the ministry of the interior to ask what he knows about it. He’s heard the same thing, so I try calling some other people, but can’t find anyone in.

I have a C-130 transport plane coming in this afternoon. On board are two pallets of food, books, and other stuff to get us through the next month. The plane is supposed to be on the ground for no longer than an hour, but now I can’t risk letting it land, even if the airport gives permission. I run upstairs to the communication center and type out a one-sentence cable to my counterpart in neighboring Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where the C-130 is waiting to take off:
There has been an attack on Dushanbe airport and we cannot allow clearance at this time
. Five minutes after my communicator sends the cable, a return one from Tashkent confirms that the plane has been diverted.

I run downstairs and jump into my car to have a look for myself. Even if I can’t make it all the way to the airport, I’ll be able to tell from the smoke how bad the attack was.

As I get closer, it strikes me as odd that there are no police, fire trucks, or ambulances racing down the road. When I stop and roll down the window to listen, I hear a plane taking off. I keep driving until I come to a policeman standing by the road. I ask him what happened with the attack. “What attack?” he asks, genuinely puzzled. I drive into the airport and stop in front of the terminal, where people are coming and going as usual.

I never do find out how the rumor started.

I’ve been in Tajikistan nine months now, and still live in Dushanbe’s old Communist Party hotel, the Oktyabrskaya. It’s off-the-rack Soviet sixties architecture, constructed of cheap concrete. Water streaks and cracks run down the side. And it’s an even bigger dump inside. The wallpaper’s bubbled, the curtains filthy. Plaster crumbles off the walls. There’s a plague of cigarette burns on the
furniture. The city water goes off for a week at a time, and there never is any hot water. Mornings I don’t bother pulling the curtains in my room because the view is a dusty park with scorched grass and a couple of dead maples and poplars.

My room is on the third floor, at the end of a corridor I share with the Russian embassy. Two Russian soldiers with automatic weapons sit behind a desk at the stairwell. Every couple of weeks I give them a carton of Marlboros, and now they know me by my first name. The Russian diplomats I pass in the hallway smile at me, not seeming to mind my living in their midst. The bloom isn’t yet off glasnost.

I’m still struck by the irony of holing up in the back of a Russian embassy. Since its founding in 1947, the CIA spied on the Russians. They were
the
enemy. We spent our lives trying to recruit them as moles, and they us. And now all of a sudden we’re on the same side, in my case I’m practically a roommate. We depend on the Russian division here to stanch the chaos sloshing across the border from Afghanistan. The dumb fear is that if the Russians fail, one Central Asian country after another will fall to the Mujahidin. An Islamic domino effect.