Quotes of the Day

An exclusive excerpt from the new novel by Robert and Dayna Baer, based on a husband and wife true-life spy story:

Damascus, Syria, October 1990: Bob

When 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.

Ali asked me if I'd go to Lebanon to tell the Lebanese Forces commander that Aoun was a liar. He'd believe an American official. At first I didn't think Ali was serious. The airport was closed, and the Syrian border tricky to cross. But Ali said he could arrange it. He'd been true to his word.

Sometime after one in the morning, we begin to ascend into the mountains between Syria and Lebanon. At the border, the convoy veers to the right, onto the military road. A soldier watches us silently. As soon as we're through, I turn around and see him closing the gate behind us.

The Lebanese side of the border is empty, a no-man's-land, and now it's a straight shot through the Biqa' Valley. At a little after 2:00 a.m, we start up a narrow road into the mountains. We go only half a mile when the first BMW stops, and my traveling companion finally breaks his silence. He tells me he'll soon leave me, and a Captain Walid will take me the rest of the way.

Another mile up the road we stop again, at the edge of a village. Before I can get out, an old Mercedes pulls up next to us. A man in jeans and a collared shirt gets out and introduces himself to me as Captain Walid. He doesn't say it, but I know he's Syrian intelligence. He opens the back door of the Mercedes, and I get in. Captain Walid gets in the front, next to the driver. The driver doesn't look at me, and we start.

The road up into the mountains is one lane, large stretches of it rough. It's too dark to see if the villages are inhabited or even where we are, but the shelled-out buildings say we're close to the confrontation lines. After a mile the driver gets out to push a couple of boulders off the road, the only thing that separates the Syrian army from the Christian Lebanese Forces militia. There has been fighting along this front since 1975.

We stop at the far edge of an abandoned village. "Here we wait," Captain Walid says. So I doze off.

When I wake up, it's dawn. The driver is gone, and Captain Walid's staring straight ahead. I've no idea what he's looking at, and I close my eyes to see if I can get back to sleep. Maybe five minutes later, Captain Walid says it's time for me to go. He gets out and opens the door for me.

Above us on the road, about 50 yards away, is a white Isuzu, with a man behind the wheel. I walk toward him. The fresh air wakes me up. I can see down in the Biqa'. It's hard to tell, but I think we're in the mountains across from Tripoli.

I climb into the passenger side of the Isuzu. The driver asks if I'm hungry. Not waiting for an answer, he hands me a manoushe wrapped in paper — flat bread garnished with olive oil and thyme. He finds one for himself in the bag between his legs, and we eat. He starts the car and we take off.

By eight, we're climbing up through a steep pass. At the top there's a sudden expanse of water, the Mediterranean. Tiny fishing boats are coming back into port. The villages we drive down through are now awake, people talking in front of grocery stores and bakeries. Every village has a church and a small, neatly kept municipal park with swing sets.

Another hour later, we reach the coastal Tripoli-Beirut road. We're only on it ten minutes before the Isuzu turns back up into the mountains at the sign to Laqluq, a small summer resort in the mountains.

The chalets and hotels in Laqluq are closed for the season. The driver turns down a gravel road lined by pine trees, and we stop in front of an A-frame house with a Lebanese Forces radio jeep parked outside. When I get out of the Isuzu, I can hear the heavy artillery from the direction of Beirut.

The Lebanese Forces commander — hollow cheeks, bald, dressed in olive green — opens the door for me. "Thank you for coming," he says, shaking my hand. He shows me into the living room, where a beautiful woman in Spandex and a sheepskin vest waits. "My wife," he says. We shake hands too, and the three of us sit in front of the fireplace.

I start. "The United States in no way supports General Aoun. No matter what he says about secret emissaries and a back channel to Washington, there isn't one."

The militia leader's wife interrupts. "If this is to be believed, you know what it means."

"This is strictly a Lebanese affair. It's the Lebanese who must decide what to do with Aoun, follow him into a war with Syria or remove him. Either way, expect no support from the United States."

Just then, we stop to listen to a volley of artillery coming from the mountain above us. To have the range to hit Beirut from here, the guns must be 155 mm.

"Why is he saying he has American support?" the militia leader asks.

"He's a liar."

"Can we trust you?" his wife asks.

"You'll have to decide that on your own."

When we finish, the Isuzu is waiting outside. If I'm lucky, I'll make it back to Damascus by dark.

I don't know if my message had anything to do with it, but a week later a battle erupts between the Lebanese Forces and army units loyal to General Aoun. Aoun loses and takes refuge in the French embassy. The U.S. never lifts a finger to help either side.

It's odd. In this business, we lie all the time, live with false identities. We suck the lifeblood out of our sources, pillage our contacts. Every arrangement has a twist; every favor comes with an IOU. But in the end, it all comes down to what Ali was talking about in a slightly different context: relationships, loyalty, trust. You have to tend to the human element. Without that, there's nothing.

Reprinted from THE COMPANY WE KEEP: A HUSBAND-AND-WIFE TRUE-LIFE SPY STORY Copyright © 2011 by Robert B. Baer and Dayna Baer. To be published March 8 by Crown Publishers, a division of Random House, Inc.

• Robert B. Baer and Dayna Baer