The Taliban Shuffle (28 page)

He still looked at me suspiciously.

“You need to call someone.”

No one answered on the foreign desk, but luckily a secretary remembered me so I was allowed to walk inside, past the display cases that in the past blandly advertised the Tribune Company’s various services. Now the four cases blasted a different message—change. One window even featured a picture of Bob Dylan, and the lyrics from “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”

They were. Advertising and circulation were down, panic was up. I walked a few feet forward and glanced in front of me, toward the elevators that led to the newsroom. And there I saw something horrific, something that would give me nightmares, something that told me life would never, ever be the same again. The quotes on the walls were the same, from writers such as Flannery O’Connor and Albert Camus. But right in front of the elevators sat a statue. A giant hideous multicolored statue of a fat businessman in a red-and-black-striped tie with six legs entitled
Bureaucratic Shuffle
. I gave it a wide berth, but I couldn’t help but stare.

“What the hell?” I asked myself, out loud.

I pushed the button for the fourth floor. Walking into the newsroom now felt like walking into the newsroom during Christmas—it was depressing, and most of the desks were empty. Only it was June, and many desks were empty because of layoffs and buyouts. Friends told me to keep my head down. For years, like everyone else, I had suffered through cost-cutting measures, grounded for a month or two at a time, forced to stay put in New Delhi or Islamabad and keep my spending small. I would stay with friends or in the cheapest hotels I could find. I had refused to give Farouq a raise—something that had started to grate on him. Even moving to Pakistan had saved the company money compared to the cost of India. My expenses the month before in Afghanistan had run about $125 a day, as I charged the newspaper only for Farouq and paid for everything else myself. During the Afghan presidential election in 2004, I had spent an average of $285 a day.

My scrimping was nothing compared with the devastation here. A photographer told me she wasn’t allowed to travel to Cairo for a great story. She meant the Cairo in Illinois. A top editor—the first man who sent me overseas, who had written my name on the back of the used envelope—asked me to lunch.

“Do I need a backup plan?” I asked him.

“It never hurts to have a plan B,” he said, carefully.

The editor of the paper had time to meet with me, and not the
usual fifteen minutes. Instead, she had an hour, and seemed unusually calm for a woman who had spent the past months fending off requests that she cut more money. I was suspicious about why. The rumors stacked up—that the foreign desks of the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Chicago Tribune
would be combined, or that we would all be fired and the
Tribune
would buy foreign coverage elsewhere. I begged another top editor to let me meet Sam Zell. But I was told no—no one could meet with Sam, even though his e-mail address started out “talktosam.”

The foreign desk tried to prove its relevance. Because our new owner and top management did not fully understand that a dateline of “Kabul, Afghanistan” meant the reporter actually was in Kabul, company newspapers had started being much more explicit about their datelines and correspondents. As part of our new self-promoting mission, all
Tribune
foreign correspondents were asked to give travel tips to readers—our best of the world, the hidden delights that tourists should enjoy. Other correspondents wrote about cities and regions people might actually visit. I sat in Chicago and wrote about Islamabad, a town with practically no social life except for what we invented. This was the newspaper equivalent of a burlesque performance. “Plus, most of the other places I once took guests have closed because of security fears or nearby suicide blasts,” I wrote, explaining why I took visitors to the Serena Hotel. Guests? I had never had guests in Pakistan. Friends and family members were more likely to vacation in prison.

My immediate boss and I decided to go to a Chicago Cubs baseball game, another exercise in futility. Before we left, I heard him pick up the phone.

“Yes. Yes, well, she’s actually right here.”

He talked some more before punching the hold button.

“Kim. The caller says he’s from the Chicago Police Department, and that you’ve been a victim of identity theft.”

“What?”

“That’s what he says. Don’t tell him anything. You need to figure out if he’s really a cop.”

I picked up the phone.

“Is this Kimberly Barker?” the alleged police officer asked.

“Yes.”

He identified himself as a cop.

“Kimberly Barker, you have been a victim of identity theft,” he then said, in a game-show voice that just as easily could have told me I won a million dollars.

“What?” I said.

He explained to me that a woman had been arrested with a fake Indiana driver’s license with my name, and with real credit cards and a bank card with my name.

I opened my purse. My wallet was gone. And I didn’t know where I had lost it because I had been carrying my driver’s license, my current bank card, and the only credit card I used separately. Whoever stole my wallet pocketed no money. The credit cards were all useless, either expired or never activated, and the bank card was old. Yes, I had done a very poor job keeping current plastic.

“Yeah, that’s me.” I sighed. “But what makes this identity theft? It sounds like regular theft.”

“The fake license.”

My identity on the run, I agreed to drive to the police station on Chicago’s South Side and file a report. It was kind of embarrassing. I had covered wars and tragedies overseas, but I had never been robbed. With the ever-ballooning recession, the United States had turned into its own kind of war zone, an economic one.

At the station the detectives took me upstairs and sat me at a long table spread with papers. They specialized in identity theft. I asked them what had happened. The day before, police had responded to a report of an illegal weapon in a nearby park and questioned people there. This woman had handed over a fake Illinois driver’s license with a fake name but her correct address. The cops then searched
the master criminal, pulling up more fake ID cards, and then a fake ID with my name and an assortment of my plastic. She was clearly an idiotic identity thief, arrested for fraud or theft at least eighteen times. After catching her, the police struggled to find me. That was considerably tougher. Some of the credit-card companies had no way to track me. The police called my working credit-card company and my bank, but the number listed for me was an old one.

“We were starting to think you didn’t exist,” the lead detective said.

“I can understand that,” I replied.

But my bank and the police kept trying, eventually waking up my father at 5:30
AM
, who instead of telling the police that I was in Chicago and giving them my cell-phone number, said he didn’t know what country I was in but I was definitely a foreign correspondent for the
Chicago Tribune
. And that’s how they found me, my bank and the Chicago police working together.

“That’s kind of impressive,” I said. “Fast.”

The police asked me questions. From what I could tell, my wallet was missing for at most twenty hours before the cops recovered my identification.

“So … can I talk to her?” I asked.

“No you can’t talk to her,” the lead detective said.

We talked more. They asked about my job. I pumped up the macho.

“Yeah, I talk to the Taliban,” I said. “I’ve hung out with them before.”

After spending almost an hour at the station, I asked my question again.

“So can I talk to her? Come on.”

The detectives looked at each other, shrugged.

“Bring her out of lockup,” the lead detective said. “Get the room ready.”

I had watched a lot of TV cop shows overseas while on embeds,
while flying from one country to another. I figured I could interrogate a perp. The police escorted me into a tiny white room, where my identity thief sat, handcuffed to the wall. She was a squat African American woman squeezed into a white tank top and black shorts. In a way, we looked similar—I wore a long-sleeved white blouse and black pants. She was visibly confused, with a wrinkled forehead and question-mark eyes. This was not protocol. I thought about how I would proceed. Macho. Over the top. Bad cop. Out of control.

“So I spend years overseas, dealing with assholes like the Taliban, risking my life, then I come home and an asshole like you steals my identity. How did you get my credit cards?”

She looked at me, mumbled that she didn’t know anything.

“Oh, you know. You know, bitch.”

Here, I was channeling a multitude of TV cop shows.

“Tell me. I can go easy on you, or I can go hard. It’s up to me how this case is prosecuted. If you cooperate, I’ll go easy. If you don’t, you’ll wish you never were born.”

“Yeah,” interjected one of the officers, who had adopted the role of good cop. “Help yourself.”

Eventually, I was able to get the name of the man who had allegedly given her my stolen cards, and the time of day she had allegedly got them. Not much, and no idea if it was true, but the experience was good training for a new career.

I walked out of the room with the two cops. We all started laughing. The lead detective was congratulatory.

“Man, you’re good,” he said. “You got more out of her in fifteen minutes than we did in six hours.”

I had still not dropped my fake-cop persona.

“Well, you know—I kind of do this for a living. We’re all on the same side.”

Where was I getting this? I left the cop station in time to see the Cubs lose. My thief would eventually be sentenced in a plea bargain, to about thirty minutes in jail.

But no matter. I soon heard my best news in months, the news I had been waiting for. Sean and Sami had been released after three months in captivity. Sean was spirited out of Pakistan to London, and Sami had crossed back to Afghanistan. After a flurry of e-mails with friends, I managed to get Sean’s new phone number in London—he was trying to lay low. While driving to Springfield to meet people from the Illinois National Guard, about to deploy to Afghanistan, I called Sean and left a message. He called back almost immediately. He sounded manic, jumping from subject to subject like a fly in a roomful of candy, tasting each one briefly before moving to the next.

“Hey, do you remember the last conversation we had?” he asked.

“You mean the one when I told you that you were a fucking idiot and were gonna get kidnapped?” I asked. “Yeah, I remember.”

“I kept thinking about that.”

But most of our conversation was one-sided, just a monologue from Sean, a run-on sentence.

“I lost some teeth,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“At one point, I was inside one safe house. I heard BBC on a radio outside, and they were doing a story on Taliban training camps in Pakistan, and Pakistani officials were denying any training camps, but I couldn’t hear the story that well because of all the gunfire from the Taliban training camp outside my door.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Sami almost lost it, at one point he was convinced we were going to be killed, and he just didn’t want to translate anymore, and without him, I had no way to communicate, so I had to tell him to pull it together.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Altogether, between driving to Springfield and back to Chicago, through various phone calls, I talked to Sean for almost four hours. Or I listened to Sean. Sami and Sean had been kidnapped almost as
soon as they met their crucial contact, although they didn’t realize it at first. They had been moved several times—their captors would torture them, by doing things like brandishing guns, even pretending to shoot them in the head with an unloaded weapon. Sean didn’t know if he would ever be released. What got him through, he said, was thinking about his two sons, about what that would do to them, and about getting home. He felt guilt so heavy it threatened to smother him. He rarely felt hope.

It was unclear who originally took Sean—possibly criminals—but he was eventually traded up to members of the Haqqani network, the worst bad guys in Pakistan. Press accounts said his TV station had paid a total of $300,000 to free Sean and Sami. Sean didn’t want to talk about money. That also made him feel guilty—any money would go to nothing good and would make all of us targets. I said I’d see him soon in London.

My nose felt brand new, and it was time to leave. After the long break, I knew that I wanted to keep my job, wanted to stay overseas. Four years into this gig, my whole identity was wrapped up in it. If I wasn’t a foreign correspondent, then who was I? But after almost two weeks in Chicago, hearing the various plans to save the newspaper, I had become a pessimist. Something had to give. With few ads, dropping subscriptions, and no other business model, the newspaper seemed like it was imploding. I worried that I would have to move back to Chicago, find a new job, or make Dave get an actual job, if we could even make us work. Nothing else seemed likely. I calculated the odds. Chicago or Dave getting a job seemed like the most realistic bets. I talked to Dave. He really didn’t want to get an actual job yet.

“But I’m pretty sure they’re going to get rid of the foreign staff,” I said. “We can’t both freelance. So I may have to move back to Chicago. We may have to move.”

“I really hope that doesn’t happen,” he said. “I’d miss you.”

“Wouldn’t you come with me? You can work there.”

“I don’t want to live in Chicago. I don’t want to run into all your ex-boyfriends all the time.”

“All my ex-boyfriends? There’s maybe one.”

“I don’t want to just be a trophy on your arm there, Kim.”

“A trophy? You’re hardly a trophy.”

I thought about what he was saying.

“What about a compromise, D.C. or New York?”

“I don’t want to live in the U.S. I have no interest.”

All my doubts clicked into place. Freedom Fries and all, this was still my country. I didn’t want to move back to the States yet, but I didn’t want to rule out the possibility of ever living here again. I had reverted to my fantasy of normalcy, children, the things I was supposed to want, rather than facing the fact that this relationship was doomed. The fights had just gotten worse; objects had been thrown. I would much rather be alone than ever yell again, even if it meant being alone in Pakistan.