“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.