The Names

Rowser traveled under a false name. He had a total of three identities and owned the relevant paper. His office outside Washington was equipped with a letter-bomb detector, a voice scrambler, an elaborate system to prevent break-ins. He was a man who never quite took the final heavy step into foolishness and pathos, despite the indications. His life itself was the chief indication, full of the ornaments of paranoia and deception. Even his hoarse voice, a forced whisper, seemed a comic symptom of the clandestine environment. But Rowser's massive drive, his will to see things through, overpowered everything else.He was a businessman. He sold insurance to other businessmen. The subjects were money, politics and force.I met him in the bar off the lobby of the Grande Bretagne, one of the duskier haunts, plush chairs, soft voices. He was a stocky man with glasses, going bald. He was drinking mineral water and making notes when I walked in."Sit down. I'm back from Kuwait.”"Are they killing Americans?”"Not so you'd notice," he said. "Not openly. What have you got for me?”"George, can I order a drink?”"Order a drink.”"Turkey is an education in how far people will go to make a point. Except no one agrees on what the point is.”"What else is new?”"The weather was good.”"Did you go to the mosques?”"Not this trip," I said."I can't understand how people go to Istanbul and don't do the mosques. I can spend hours in one mosque.”"I was there on business, George.”"Very good. But you can always make time for a mosque.”"Are you religious?”"Get away from me. I like the awe, that's all.”"Impressive architecture. I concede that much.”"No pictures. I have entree to Vatican pictures no one gets in to see without stunning credentials. I want to see the stuff in Naples. The hidden rooms.”"Who do you know?”"I have a cardinal in the States.”The waiter came, head tilted, a faintly mocking look in his eyes. I ordered a beer. Rowser's ultra-secure briefcase sat next to him in the soft chair. It was full of painstaking assessments, I was sure. Data on the stability of the countries he'd been visiting. Facts on the infrastructure. Probabilities, statistics. These were the music of Rowser's life, the only coherence he needed.What connected us was risk.He'd started in this line of work by gathering material for people who wrote scholarly reports on large-scale death and destruction. Rowser had a gift for numbers and a temperament that enabled him to separate mathematical techniques and actuarial science from the terrifying events he culled for his figures. In universities and research centers he attended any number of conferences at which people discussed such choice calamities as reactor meltdowns, runaway viruses and three-day spasm wars.Somebody had to tell us what our chances were. Rowser's problem was that he didn't have the breadth and penetration to succeed as a risk analyst. He knew what he was, a night-school hustler, a man who figured the angles, brusque, enterprising, chained to late nights and caffeine. He was no game theorist or geopolitician. He had no system of assumptions and principles. What he had was a set of interlocking facts he'd drawn from tons of research material on the cost-effectiveness of terror.There had been over five thousand terrorist incidents in the past decade.Kidnappings were routine business.Ransom requests of five million dollars were not unusual.In this decade a quarter of a billion dollars in ransom money had been paid to terrorists.Business executives were prime targets.U.S. executives led the world, being targeted with particular frequency in the Middle East and Latin America.Simple. He convinced a medium-sized insurance company to sell ransom policies to the multinationals. His job was to figure the risk of enrolling applicants for coverage. He read everything in the public record on terror and traveled widely to set up lines of data-gathering that helped him draw conclusions about overseas operations, the attitudes of host countries, political currents in general. Secrecy was important. If a terrorist group knew that a certain corporation insured its executives against kidnap and ransom, they'd clearly want to consider an action.The man of narrow outlook becomes immersed. Rowser occupied himself profoundly in the customs and attitudes of the secret life. His thoroughness was compulsive and regenerative, a pathological condition. He stopped carrying company ID, he committed phone numbers and addresses to memory, he spent small fortunes on electronic devices. I don't think he became involved in these things as some men do, because they verge on something deep and unseen, a dream life or alternate self. He wasn't the kind of man who plays at danger. I think he was simply scared. Risk had become a physical thing."What's that?”"A book I bought my kid.”"I'm a two-time loser," he said."We're only separated, George.”"Get divorced.”"Why?”"Absolutely. I don't even remember them. If they walked down the street together, I'd go right by.”"I don't want to discuss marriage. I did that an hour ago.”"Drink your beer, we'll go.”"Where are we having lunch?”"I don't eat lunch. My doctor told me to drop one meal. We'll walk around the block. I want an overview on Turkey.”"It's damn hot out there.”"I don't like talking where it may not be secure. Drink down your beer, we'll go.”"It's insurance. That's all it is, George. Nobody's listening.”"I'm the kind of person he doesn't like to break a habit. I started doing things this way and maybe it's not necessary anymore. Maybe it was never necessary, looking objectively. But a habit is the toughest thing to break for this type person. There is no logic in most habits. This is exactly why they take such hold. A habit is a death grip to somebody like me.”The harsh dry scrape in his voice was halfway poignant. I first met Rowser at a seminar on foreign investments. Many voices besides his own at the Hay-Adams that day. Curious, I thought, how all these regional accents converged on the same sets of words. The language of business is hard-edged and aggressive, drawing some of its technical cant from the weapons pools of the south and southwest, a rural nurturing in a way, a blooding of the gray-suited, the pale, the corporate man. It's all the same game, these cross-argots suggest.By this time Rowser was head of development for the Northeast Group, a subsidiary of a two-billion-dollar conglomerate he referred to as "the parent." No more edgy executives. The Northeast Group specialized in political risk insurance for corporations with foreign holdings. In recent years U.S. assets had been seized in two dozen countries and businessmen were looking for financial protection. All those grave Zaireans, those Pakistanis with their sensual lips and bright smiles, voices in melodic ascent, what sweet-natured technocrats they made, running the plants we'd designed and financed, using our very jargon.Rowser and his group were writing political risk insurance in impressive amounts. They sold portions of the original policies to syndicates in order to spread risk and generate whatever cash flow the parent did not supply. He broadened his data collection network and installed a few key people called risk analysts, the title he'd felt unworthy of in the days when he gathered facts for the end of the world. This was the job he offered me. Associate director of risk analysis, Middle East.I was a freelance writer, something of a Renaissance hack. Booklets, pamphlets, leaflets, all kinds of institutional litter for government and industry. Newsletters for a computer firm. Scripts for industrial films. Tax-planning strategies, investment strategies. We had three meetings. At the time I was ghosting a book on global conflict for an Air Force general associated with one of Rowser's old encampments, the Institute of Risk Analysis at American University. Rowser had seen early pages of the manuscript and it was possible he'd been impressed by the way I'd reshaped the general's muddled thinking. The general was a living wilderness. Everyone in the risk community knew this.Rowser told me that material flowed into Athens from various control points around the Mediterranean, the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. It needed structuring, it needed perusal by someone with intellectual range. He wanted a view that was broader than the underwriter's or statistician's.A tallish fellow with an educated face and khaki hair might be just what he needed for the region.I turned him down. Kathryn, Tap and I were living in an old gabled house in the Champlain Islands, a place her father had owned, and we liked it there, among farms and apple orchards, a lake culture lying between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks. My grubstreet ways suited us. We had a picture of ourselves as people who needed little. Kathryn was managing a crafts school on North Hero, one island up from us, and the occasional presence in our home of laconic young potters and quilt-makers gave the place a dusting of old-fashioned virtue. We wanted Tap to grow up in North America.A year later we were in Toronto, dividing our books, and Kathryn was speaking Greek to a tape machine. So much for North America. I got in touch with Rowser. He had a man for the region but said he was interested in talking to me. I said it had to be Athens. He'd try to work it out, he told me. It took three months.I'd have a steady job, an office, a secretary, a schedule and clear-cut responsibilities while my wife worked in a trench and my son wrote a novel. A happy pair. They were the freelancers now but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was the one taking the major risk. There was nothing to come back to if I failed, no place in particular I belonged. They were my place, the only true boundaries I had. I went, I set out, as a man on a dangerous journey, feeling a grimness and will I'd never felt before.Self-satisfied, willing to settle.What are my qualities? This was a question that nagged at the whole affair. Passion, character, fortitude and wit. Cunning and dumb luck. I'd have to command something of all of these. Is this why people try to force events, to find out how complete they are and what they've managed to accumulate of drifting fortune? Some kinds of loneliness are an accusation. Do we feel this is what we are, broken down to entity, unpigmented?The rocky brown island, the chalk village, the men spreading their yellow nets, all these forms of emitted light. The layered Minoan soil, ochre and rust and soot, and the shards of painted pottery, these are the passions that saturate the world. And it was Rowser, walking uphill past the jewelry shops along the pedestrian mall, half panting, who was the middleman of all this hazardous love. Rowser in his insurance man's gray suit."Lloyd's wants to declare the Gulf a war zone," he said. "That could double the tanker premium.”"How do you know?”"I got some playback from a Kuwaiti defense meeting. They're figuring a worst-case scenario. Lloyd's is. Tanker hulks littering the strait. The robed ones are muttering in their beards. Even the parent is nervous about the prospect. It impacts on almost everything they're involved in.”"A war zone.”"It has a ring, doesn't it.”He wanted to know about Turkey. I had precise figures for nonperforming loans. I had classified telex traffic between bank branches in the region. I had foreign exchange factors, inflation rates, election possibilities, exports and imports. I had cars lined up for gasoline, daily power cuts, no water coming out of household taps, crowds of unemployed young men standing on corners, fifteen-year-old girls shot to death for politics. No coffee, no heating oil, no spare parts for combat aircraft. I had martial law, black markets, the International Monetary Fund, God is great.I'd been given the scrambled telexes by my friend David Keller, a credit head at the Mainland Bank. Much of the other material I'd been given by our control for Turkey. The streets of Istanbul were data in their own right, the raw force, the unraveling. The rest came from our contacts at the World Bank and various research institutes.We'd circled back and were heading downhill, single file, along a narrow sidewalk. He talked to me over his shoulder."Where are you from? Did I ever ask?”"Medium-sized town. Pennsylvania.”"I'm from Jersey City.”"What do you want me to say, George? We're a long way from home?”We crossed the street to avoid a deposit of soap suds."Do I want to go to the Acropolis?”"Everybody goes," I told him."Is there climbing?”"They all do it. The lame, the halt.”"What's up there exactly that I have to see it?”"You go to Naples to look at dirty pictures.”"I have to finagle that. This is nothing," he said.Five minutes later we were in the office, two modest rooms connected by an arched opening. My secretary, a middle-aged woman who liked to be called Mrs. Helen, was at a funeral in the north somewhere.Rowser took off his shoes and asked to see telexes, notes, memoranda, whatever I could give him. Stamped documents, rows of figures. As he settled into his reading I felt myself beginning to perceive the silence, the eerie calm that closed in gradually every time I came in here from the street. The building was in a cul-de-sac, a preciously quiet spot in a city hardened to noise. Noise is a kind of rain to Athenians, an environment shaped by nature. Nothing can prevent it."When do you leave, George?”"Tomorrow.”"TW?”"Right.”"Expect a stop.”"It's nonstop.”"Expect a stop. Shannon or Goose Bay.”"Why?" he said."They take off without full tanks. They tell you it's too hot here and the fuel expands. Or the runway's too short and the fuel is heavy. It's the fuel all right. More expensive here. They like to fill up elsewhere.”"It comes back to that.”"No escape," I said.He went back to his reading. I sat at my desk with a lemon drink, watching him. He had a dozen nervous gestures. He touched his face, his clothes, blinking almost constantly. I imagined him stranded in Goose Bay. Big empty remote innocent Labrador. Scraped-clean-by-the-wind Labrador. No politics, no risk. The place would be an offense to him, a white space he could not know through numbers. He would die there, gesturing.