Death of a Spy (10 page)

18

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Daria was on her way to the neighborhood supermarket that evening when her cell rang.

“Hey,” said Mark. “How’s it going?”

Because she was using one hand to hold her phone to her ear, it was a struggle for her to push the stroller straight over the bumpy sidewalk. “Fine. Well, not fine, really. She still has a diaper rash and she’s cranky.” After being up half the night before with Lila and with her all day, Daria was cranky too. “I walked around with her too much. Sorry.”

It embarrassed her that, after being around small kids so much at the orphanages, she would have screwed up with her own. But most of the kids at the orphanages were older. And she wasn’t responsible for changing their diapers.

“Don’t be sorry.”

“Our neighbor downstairs said I should try egg whites. As in smear the egg whites all over her butt.”

Egg whites! Sure,
why not
baste her baby’s bottom as if it were a pie shell? It sounded to Daria like a good way to give Lila salmonella poisoning. Before Lila had been born, she’d researched diaper creams and had come up with three that she thought were the best. None had been available in any of the pharmacies in Bishkek, so she’d had to settle for a Chinese-made brand that she worried might have radiator fluid in it.

“Yeah, let’s not do that,” said Mark. “Listen, I’ve got some bad news and some really good news.”

Daria checked the time. Mark was supposed to be in flight at the moment. “Where are you?”

“That’s the bad news part. I agreed to do a job for Kaufman.” A three-second silence, then, “Mark—”

“It might be related to what happened to Larry, otherwise I wouldn’t have said I’d do it. That airline sticker from Nakhchivan that you noticed, it’s had some ripple effects.”

“You already
accepted
this job?”

“I said I’d see what I could do over the next couple days.” Before she could object, he added, “I know, I know, the timing completely sucks.”

Another silence, then, “You didn’t think to maybe call me first? I mean, dealing with Larry, that I understood. But…” Daria shook her head. She’d known calls like this would come. Just as she knew there’d be times when her work would get busy and she’d need Mark to cover the home front. They’d talked about all that. But she hadn’t thought it would start up so soon after Lila had been born. “What kind of job?”

“An investigation of sorts.”

“Why do they need you?”

“I guess the guy they have on it now is running into some trouble.”

“What kind of trouble? And if he’s running into trouble, why wouldn’t you?” Upon not receiving an answer, Daria said, “Mark, I don’t—”

“Listen, the good news—make that the
great
news—is that the job is in Azerbaijan. I’ll be in Baku by tomorrow morning.” He neglected to mention that he’d be traveling to Baku, a mere three hundred miles southeast of Tbilisi, via Istanbul, which lay over eight hundred miles to the west. If the Russians really were after him, it would be better to stay moving, and to get out of Georgia sooner rather than later. And he’d feel safer sleeping on the plane than he would here at the airport, even in the secure zone. True, the Russians also had deep ties to Azerbaijan, but that was Mark’s turf as well; if anyone tried to follow him there, he’d lose them in no time.

“OK, now I’m confused.”

“Kaufman got our PNGs lifted, Daria. It was part of the deal I struck with him. We can go back to Azerbaijan. We can raise Lila in Baku.”

The news was so unexpected that Daria didn’t know what to say. But she could hear the excitement in Mark’s voice, and he wasn’t an easily excitable guy. And she knew how much he loved Baku. She didn’t want to be a downer. Besides, they’d talked before about the possibility of moving back to Baku if their PNGs ever got lifted, and she’d agreed she could run her foundation from there, maybe expand into helping orphanages on that side of the Caspian.

But those talks had always been theoretical, because Mark had never been able to make any headway with the Azeris on getting his PNG, much less hers, lifted. “I thought Kaufman hated me?”

“I told him that I wouldn’t take the job unless we both could resettle in Baku.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

A year earlier, she might have greeted the news with more enthusiasm. She’d come to Bishkek not because she’d harbored any particular fondness for the city, or for Kyrgyzstan, but just because it happened to be close to some of the orphanages she’d arranged to help fund. She’d originally viewed the move as temporary, while she did penance for past misdeeds and figured out what to do with the rest of her life. But her penance had become her passion. She took immense satisfaction from interacting with the kids, and working with Nazira, and managing a foundation that was now funded by real donors instead of just money she’d wheedled out of the CIA.

And at the same time, she’d come to like Bishkek. She liked the leafy parks, the nearby mountains, and summer trips to Lake Issyk-Kul. And she sensed that undertaking a major move—Baku was a thousand miles away—on top of running her foundation and raising Lila would be a recipe for stress and anxiety.

“Baku has got so much more going for it than Bishkek. We’ll have better schools—”

“And if Lila never says she wants to be president she might even be able to attend them.”

Daria was referring to an incident she and Mark had discussed, where a young student in Azerbaijan had been asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and he’d made the mistake of saying he wanted to be president. The student had been told there was only one president, and that the position was taken; the student’s parents had been taken to task for having raised a child to would dare utter such an effrontery. As a result of the attention, the child had been pulled from the school.

“She’ll be in a private school. We’ll have better health care—”

“People in Azerbaijan go to Iran for health care.”

“Used to go to Iran. It’s getting better in Baku. A lot better. All the oil money, you know? They’re building a brand new hospital downtown, and the private clinics, a couple of them are great.” Then, sounding a little less flip and a little more annoyed, “I thought we’d talked about this.”

“Yeah, we did.” But that had been a year ago, thought Daria. When moving to Baku had been a theoretical possibility instead of a real one.

“I thought you said it wouldn’t be a big deal, that you could run your foundation from there.”

Daria had never been crazy about Baku. It was a big city—over two million people—and surrounded by desert. But Baku was definitely more cosmopolitan than Bishkek and there was a ton more money sloshing around there, which meant far more modern amenities. She had no interest in patronizing the Gucci and Tiffany stores in downtown Baku, but figured it was a pretty safe bet that the mothers who did weren’t basting their baby’s asses with egg whites. And there was no denying that the health care system in Kyrgyzstan was abysmal. Before Lila, she hadn’t given it a second thought. She knew the risks—millions of people around the world dealt with lousy health care systems, she and Mark could too—but what if Lila got sick? Was it fair to put her at risk?

What if they stayed in Bishkek and Lila got really ill in the months or years to come? If she suddenly spiked a high fever, where would they take her? Almaty was two hours away, across an international border.

She imagined trips to the local pediatrician’s office in downtown Baku. It would be a clean and orderly place. Instead of an old man who reeked of vodka—she thought of the anesthesiologist who’d inspired her to elect for a natural childbirth—it would be a woman in a white coat who smiled.

“Think they have Triple Paste diaper cream in Baku?” she asked. “It’s got lanolin in it. I want it.”

“I’ll check.”

“Either that or Desitin, the maximum-strength formulation, not the rapid relief one.”

“OK.”

“Baku will be great.” She didn’t really think that now, but she was hoping she would later, after she’d caught up on some sleep and didn’t have to worry about things like Kegel exercises and diaper rashes. “The news took me by surprise, and we’ll have to talk about the logistics of the move, but we’ll make it work. In the meantime, be safe.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Just remember, you’re a father now.”

“I’ll call or e-mail when I can. But from here on out, figure I’m on field rules. Maybe I should have started them earlier, but this whole thing’s just kind of snowballed.”

When Mark was on a job, he typically communicated with her only when absolutely necessary. He did it for the same reason that they’d both used complex anonymous corporate structures to register their respective professional enterprises, why Daria never allowed herself to be photographed with prospective donors to her foundation, why the last name on Lila’s birth certificate was Stephenson, and why she and Mark had alias documents in that name as well and had used that name when purchasing their apartment in Bishkek. It was all to create as secure a firewall as possible between their personal lives, and their lives—both past and present—in the intelligence underworld.

When it came to communications, even when they both took precautions, they could never be certain those communications weren’t being traced. So when Mark was on a job, radio silence with home was the rule.

“I know the drill,” said Daria.

19

Baku, Azerbaijan
The next day

Baku was booming.

The main airport terminal, which Mark blazed through on his way to the line of cabs out front, was completely new, all flashy curves and gleaming steel and glass—it was three times the size of the old one he’d passed through when he’d been kicked out of the country. The road from the airport, instead of the chaotic potholed mess that it had been just a few years ago, was now an eight-lane, newly paved modern highway that his cab driver navigated at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour—because he’d been promised a two hundred dollar tip if Mark arrived at the embassy in time for an important meeting. As Mark watched for cars that might be following him—he doubted many could keep up—he observed that the highway was lined with thousands of decorative street lamps, each one of which he guessed cost more than the average Azeri made in a year.

The boom, fueled by massive amounts of oil money, had already been well under way when Mark had gotten the boot, but it still surprised him to see—good Lord, there was even a Trump Tower—how much had changed in the time he’d been gone.

One thing that hadn’t, however, was the US embassy on Azadliq Prospect. Constructed during Baku’s first oil boom over a century earlier, before the Soviets had driven the Azeri oil industry into the ground, the building itself was grand—much nicer than the nuclear-bunker fortress-embassy that the US had built in Bishkek—but it was set behind high walls, and the utilitarian green-metal entrance door that one needed to pass through to get to it was reminiscent of an underfunded prison.

As Mark jogged up to the entrance, he thought, and not for the first time, would it kill the State Department to slap a fresh coat of paint on the entrance door, and paste up a sign that said something cheerful? W
ELCOME
TO
THE
E
MBASSY
OF
THE
U
NITED
S
TATES
OF
A
MERICA!
W
E
’
RE
GLAD YOU CAME TO VISIT!
Because for a lot of people, that grungy door was all they’d ever see of the United States.

At a little guard shack, Mark encountered security checkpoints manned by armed Azeris in blue uniforms. He noted the electric wiring in the little shack was still a mess—the circuit panel still lacked a cover—and the metal detector was the same ancient model that had been there for as long as he could remember.

He handed over his new passport, the one that the US embassy in Tbilisi had brought him, courtesy of Kaufman, just before he’d boarded his flight for Istanbul; it was brown, marking him as a US citizen engaged in official US business.

“Cell phone?” asked the guard, pointing to Mark’s shoulder bag. “Laptop?”

“I’m keeping them. Call for approval.”

Civilians were required to turn over all electronics, but not people who worked at the embassy.

“You have an appointment?”

“With Roger Davis.”

Officially, Davis was the embassy’s political counselor; unofficially, he was the CIA’s chief of station/Azerbaijan.

Permission to bring electronics into the embassy was denied, so Mark handed over Larry’s laptop and camera, along with his own phone, iPad, two charging cords, and an adapter for the iPad that allowed him to connect it to other devices;; in return, the guard gave him a laminated ticket with the number three on it.

A student intern met him at the marine guard checkpoint inside the main embassy building, but instead of bringing him to Davis, she ushered him to the pleasantly cluttered office of the public affairs officer and told him to wait.

He didn’t mind the first half hour. Baku was nine hours ahead of Washington, DC. Which meant that when people first arrived at the embassy in the morning, they’d have a mini-mountain of cables to sort through—everything that Washington would have sent during the course of the previous day back in the States. Because Mark had shown up at the embassy at 9:30 a.m., Davis might have been legitimately busy.

After an hour, the public affairs officer—a nervous woman who alternated between chewing her nails while staring at her computer and typing furiously on her keyboard—looked up as though seeing Mark for the first time, apologized for the delay, and asked whether he’d like some tea and cookies. Mark politely declined, but did ask for a phone so that he could call the US embassy in Georgia.

He managed to reach Keal, who’d had no luck finding Katerina. Mark suggested that the Georgian Bureau of Vital Records, or the state pension system that Georgians contributed to, might be able to help, especially if the request came directly from the US embassy. With a name, a birth month and year—July 1968—they should be able to find something. Keal reluctantly agreed to place a few more calls.

After an hour and a half, Mark announced that he needed to visit the restroom—he knew the way, no need to show him—and instead walked unmolested past the public affairs division, where a young foreign service officer was monitoring the Facebook and Twitter feeds of Azeri activists, and into his old office on the third floor.

Roger Davis was reclining in his executive chair, feet up on a six-foot-long oak desk that Mark had bought for the equivalent of twenty dollars when the Azeris had been clearing out a bunch of Soviet junk from Baku’s old city hall. Davis was reading
Zaman
, Turkey’s largest newspaper, and drinking from a liter bottle of Diet Coke.

“Am I disturbing you?” Mark glanced around the office. It was pretty much the same as when he’d left it. A fraying blue rug, a tall window that looked out onto the little courtyard where he’d liked to eat lunch when the weather allowed, a coffee table, and two wingback chairs. No real decorations, save for a bust of George Washington that sat on the coffee table, a contribution from the station’s first chief back in the nineties, when the embassy had been housed in a hotel. Mark did notice the old filing cabinets were gone; in their place was an array of printers, computers, and a row of external hard drives. A laptop sat on Davis’s desk.

Davis eyed Mark. “Who let you up here?”

Mark looked around, then shook his head. “Boy, I don’t miss this place.”

He was telling the truth. He missed Baku, but he didn’t miss his old job as station chief. He hadn’t been cut out to work behind a desk, to be badgered constantly by bureaucrats at Langley who were more worried about not making mistakes than producing good intelligence.

“I just got back from a team meeting. I have to finish with my notes. So if you could wait just a little longer.”

Mark had never met Davis before. But there weren’t many CIA officers out there who lasted long enough to get promoted to station chief. Cordiality among those who had was typically the rule.

“OK.” Mark plopped down in one of the wingback chairs.

“The ambassador wants to be here too. That’s also part of the holdup. I’ll let you know when she’s ready.”

“I’ll wait here.”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Heard they’re building a new hospital downtown. Pretty soon Baku isn’t even going to qualify as a hardship post. It’ll be like Paris.”

Davis snorted. “Yes, the Paris of the Caspian. State already downgraded the hardship differential, but they screw with it any more and people are going to be tripping over each other to get the hell out of here. Which might not be a bad thing. People stay in one place too long, they get stuck in a rut. Start losing perspective.”

Davis had only been running the station for two months, whereas Mark had run it for five years.

“I’m not here to screw you over, Roger. I’m here because Kaufman asked for my help and I agreed to give it. While I’m here, I’ll do my best not to mess with your operation.”

Given the circumstances, he thought it best not to mention that he intended to set up his spies-for-hire shop, indefinitely, right in downtown Baku.

Davis put in a brief call to the ambassador. A tall woman—taller than either Mark or Davis by several inches, with wide nostrils and a masculine jawline—showed up about ten minutes later.

The good news, thought Mark, was that she hadn’t just bought her post with a massive political contribution. She’d worked for the State Department for the past thirty years, spoke Russian, Turkish, French, and a bit of Azeri, and knew her policy well. The bad news was that she’d worked for the State Department for the past thirty years. Mark knew her by reputation, but she’d spent most of her career in Turkey and Washington, DC, so they’d never met.

“I understand that Roger here,” the ambassador gestured to Davis, “has people he can send to Ganja. I’m really a bit confused as to why we need you at all.”

Mark knew perfectly well why he was in Baku, and he suspected Roger Davis and the ambassador did too—because Kaufman didn’t have faith in Davis and his team. What he said, though, was, “I’m here because Ted Kaufman asked me to be here. He wants me to debrief and deliver an alias packet to your branch chief in Ganja—I understand the guy’s a little anxious?”

“It’s nothing we can’t handle here on our own.”

“After that, I’m supposed to investigate—”

“I read the cable,” said Davis.

“My obligations go beyond Ted Kaufman’s and the CIA’s,” said the ambassador. “The media isn’t going to set up camp outside Kaufman’s home if you cause an international incident.”

The ambassador was the direct representative of the president. Part of her job was to make sure no intelligence operation came back to bite the current administration in the rear, or conflicted with the larger goals of the State Department.

“You’d be investigating a possible murder on foreign soil,” she added. “Without the consent of the local authorities. That makes me
very
uncomfortable.”

“Things have changed since you left,” said Davis to Mark. “A lot. The amount of money pouring into this place…” He exhaled loudly, as though at a loss for words. “I mean, every other day we get some wacko-bird from Congress passing through, trying to wheedle some shady deal for their home district, thinking they can just show up and we’ll act as their broker! Put them in touch with the
right people
! And that’s if we’re lucky. It’s the ones that try to convince me the northern half of Iran might secede and join Azerbaijan that are really nuts. I mean, you can’t believe the level of ignorance.”

“Oh, I can believe it,” said Mark.

“Point being, the stakes are higher here now. Most people might not have a clue, but they still care what happens here, or think they do. There’s a lot of money on the line.”

Sensing Davis was just voicing general concerns because he didn’t want to run afoul of Kaufman by voicing specific ones, Mark said, “Fine. Point taken. But what does that have to do with what Kaufman has asked me to do in Ganja?”

The ambassador said, “I took the liberty of calling our embassy in Bishkek. People there speak highly of you and the work your firm has done in Central Asia. But the difference here is, well…” The ambassador shook her head in disapproval as her voice trailed off.

“The difference is, I’m being thrust upon you by Washington,” said Mark, finishing the thought. “To do a job you don’t want done.”