Death of a Spy (17 page)

Mark reached into his satchel and retrieved the money Cox had given him. He considered also giving Rasul one of the two tubes of Desitin, but decided that would be weird, and anyway, he wanted to save both for Daria.

Rasul’s hand came up to his mouth. “This money. You intend to
give
it to me?”

“It’s yours. Your wife designated you and your daughter as the only beneficiaries. The one thing I would suggest is that you accompany me to a bank and that I officially sign the money over to you there. Because once I sign it over to you, then it becomes your responsibility. If it were to be stolen, if any of your neighbors…” Mark let his voice trail off. Rasul knew better than anyone that he didn’t live in the safest of neighborhoods. “To avoid all chance of that, I recommend that the transfer be made at a bank. Do you have one you prefer?”

“We keep an account at Ganjabank.”

“That would be fine.”

“Now? You wish to go now?”

“I wish to do as you wish, Mr. Tagiyev. I am available now, or if now is not convenient for you, I am more than happy to arrange to meet you at the time of your choosing.”

“I’d have to take the baby with me.”

“Of course. This is no problem.”

“Then I can go now.”

Mark accompanied a bewildered Rasul Tagiyev and his daughter to the downtown branch of Ganjabank, waited until a bank officer emerged to usher them into a back room, then thrust the money at the young man.

“Here,” said Mark. “You don’t need me to set up your account. Good luck. I am so sorry for your loss.”

“But…” Rasul was flustered. With one hand he held his daughter, with the other he took the envelope. “…don’t I need to sign—”

“The relevant papers will be mailed to you shortly. In the meantime, your bank deposit receipt will serve as proof that the transfer from Bazarduzu to you was made.”

With that, Mark left the bank, bought a pack of cigarettes—Winstons, like Cox had been smoking—and hailed a cab. Minutes later, he was staring once again at the tenement house where Rasul lived. The old Azeri was still out front.

“Rasul has forgotten the baby’s bottle. Can you blame him?” Before the old man could answer, Mark produced the pack of cigarettes and matches. “A gift. For giving me directions earlier.”

Mark bounded up the stairs so that by the time he got to the second floor he was breathing heavily. Work smart, he told himself, glancing both ways down the hall. Get in and get out quickly, minimize the risk, and be prepared to run like hell if you have to.

He noted with satisfaction that it took him less than a minute to pick the lock with the improvised set of tools he’d made just before buying the Turkish delight—a thin triple rake and a hook pick, both made from bobby pins and electric tape; thicker versions of the same made from the steel wire used in binder clips; and a tension bar made from a bent pair of tweezers. As a desk-bound station chief, his tradecraft skills had started to atrophy, but they’d grown considerably sharper of late.

In the enclosed balcony, which extended out from the kitchen and was being used as a pantry, he opened the one double-hung window that looked out onto the street; he didn’t relish the thought of dropping from the second floor to the ground, but he’d done such a thing before, and wanted to be sure he had an emergency avenue of escape, should it come to that.

He checked his watch—five past two. He’d give himself ten minutes, any more than that and he’d be pushing his luck.

When people had something to hide, experience had taught Mark that, more often than not, the bedroom was where they chose to hide it. There was a perception of safety, that at least at night, in the darkness, an intruder couldn’t steal in and take the item without being detected. So it was in Rasul and Aida Tagiyev’s bedroom that he began his search.

He could still detect what he perceived to be the scent of Aida, or at least the perfume she’d worn. The smell of rose petals was in the closet, where her dresses hung, and inside the dresser, where her T-shirts and jeans and undergarments were neatly folded. It was a smell distinct from the earthy smell of Rasul’s clothes, or the diaper smell of the child.

He searched the closet, under the squeaky mattress, under and inside dresser drawers, behind the mirror that hung on the wall, between the stacks of unused diapers, underneath the plastic bag that lined the garbage bin… He worked methodically, mentally dividing the bedroom into quadrants and searching everything in one quadrant before moving on to the next. When he came upon a small Canon pocket camera that was stashed inside Aida’s rhinestone-encrusted jewelry box, he thought maybe he’d found what he was looking for. The SD memory card inside it would be where a spy might think to hide files. But when he slotted the card into the external adapter that was connected to his iPad, it was blank.

It took him four minutes just to finish the bedroom. Another three to search most of the kitchen—in the freezer, underneath a cookie tin, under the small microwave, above the cabinets…in all the drawers. At this rate, he knew he wouldn’t have nearly enough time to conduct a thorough search of the rest of the apartment. Rasul could arrive at any moment. He glanced out the window above the kitchen sink. The old man out front was gone.

Think
.

Mark reasoned that, if it was here, it would be hidden in a place where neither Rasul nor anyone else would be likely to stumble upon it. So what in the apartment would Rasul be unlikely to use? Mark had already gone through all of Aida’s personal effects in the bedroom, but now he searched through the cleaning supplies under the sink—hell, maybe Rasul helped clean, but maybe he didn’t—and inside her winter boots and jackets in the closet near the front door, and…

Fifteen minutes after he’d broken into the apartment, he found it—a small unlabeled thumb drive—in the bathroom, inside an over-the-counter medication bottle for menstrual cramping. He slotted it into a USB port on his external adapter and a single Excel file showed up.

He breathed a sigh of relief. It was as he’d hoped.

All that Raymond Cox had told Mark about Aida had suggested she was reliable and organized. The type of person who almost certainly would have been sure to back up any important files in her possession. Mark had been a bit worried when Rasul mentioned that a representative from Bazarduzu had come by to collect her laptop, but reasoned that she would have been unlikely to store such an incriminating file there. Which left an external memory source, or online. And if it had been stored on a memory drive, well, the only place she’d visited between work and where she was murdered was home.

He’d been hoping that whoever had killed Aida had either been too careless or too stupid to think to search her apartment for it. They had been.

31

Mark exited the same way he had entered the building, then ducked into a maze of alleys that cut between the tenements. Once he was sure no one was following him, he made his way to a main road and hailed a cab. From the back seat, he scrolled through the Excel file.

All the text was in Azeri. The heading was labeled B
AZARDUZU
C
ONSTRUCTION
: A
NNUAL
F
INANCIAL
S
TATEMENT
AND
S
UPPLEMENTARY
I
NFORMATION
. Under that was a table of contents that listed B
ALANCE
S
HEETS
, S
TATEMENT
OF
E
ARNINGS
, S
TATEMENT
OF
C
ASH
F
LOWS
, and S
UPPLEMENTAL
S
TATEMENTS
. Listed as a subset under S
UPPLEMENTAL
S
TATEMENTS
was G
ENERAL
AND
A
DMINISTRATIVE
E
XPENSES
, C
ONTRACTS
C
OMPLETED
, C
ONTRACTS
IN
P
ROGRESS
…

The total document, including the supplemental statements, was over two hundred pages.

He scrolled down, skimming over each section. A
SSETS
, C
URRENT
L
IABILITIES
, C
ONTRACT
R
EVENUE
… most of the firm’s income for the prior year had come from projects in and around Ganja that were listed with considerable specificity in the supplemental statements: repairs to a bridge that spanned the Ganja River, the refurbishing of the train station, road repaving all over greater Ganja. There was one line item, however, that accounted for over forty million manats—almost thirty percent of Bazarduzu’s gross revenue from the prior year—that wasn’t backed up by
any
supplemental information.

That line item was N
AKHCHIVAN
.

“Sir,” said the cab driver. “We’re here.”

Mark looked up. They’d reached the downtown.

He paid the driver, walked to a bench opposite a thirty-foot-tall photograph of the president of Azerbaijan that adorned the Stalin-baroque city hall, and spent the next hour searching the rest of the document for more references either to, or related to, Nakhchivan. There were none.

The only useful thing that he did find—under G
ENERAL
AND
A
DMINISTRATIVE
E
XPENSES
—was a supplemental payroll statement, which linked to a payroll report, which in turn listed every employee of Bazarduzu Construction, their titles and compensation for the prior year, the amount withheld for taxes, their home addresses, their hire dates, and their state social insurance numbers.

Jackpot
, he thought, as he scanned the payroll for someone high enough in the hierarchy to know about the Nakhchivan project. Out of over three thousand employees, only four made in excess of a hundred thousand manats a year: the owner of the company, who was also the local ex-com; the vice president; the chief financial officer; and the chief engineer. Between them, the four men had pocketed just shy of twenty million manats the previous year. Most of that twenty million had gone to the ex-com, but targeting him would be too risky, so Mark looked up the addresses of the remaining three.

The chief engineer, he noted, didn’t live too far away.

32

In central Ganja, to the west of the Abbas Mosque, stood what looked like a clone of all the recently restored turn-of-the-century buildings in Baku.

Mark found his way to the back of it, picked the lock on a windowless gray metal door, and let himself into a utility room that housed electric circuit breakers and a row of new-looking hot water heaters. A door off the utility room led to a central hall that ran lengthwise down the building.

Mark couldn’t help but compare this place to the tenement he’d just left. Here there were decadently high ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and textured wallpaper imprinted with fleurs-de-lis. A ruby-red silk carpet runner had been unfurled down the center of the parquet floor. An elevator with brass doors beckoned, but Mark took the stairs to the third floor.

From inside apartment 301, he heard what he thought was the faint sound of a television. He put his ear to the door. Definitely a television, and someone was channel surfing. It was just after three o’clock in the afternoon; he’d hoped the chief engineer of Bazarduzu Construction would still be at work. With the apartment occupied, he reconsidered his options, then hiked up to the third floor and stood outside apartment 401, which lay directly above 301. This time, when he put his ear to the door he heard nothing, so he ventured to knock.

No one answered.

Mark pulled out his lock picks, cursed under his breath after a minute of unsuccessful fiddling, bent his thick hook pick to a more acute angle, and finally got the door open. The place he stepped into made his apartment back in Bishkek look like a hovel by comparison. Hand-knotted Turkmen carpets lay on glossy parquet floors, stainless-steel appliances sparkled in the kitchen, recessed lighting illuminated black granite countertops…

“Hello?” he called in Azeri. “Maintenance here!”

Upon receiving no reply, he did a quick search of the five bedrooms—there was no easy emergency egress; he’d just have to risk it—before turning his attention to the toilet in the master bathroom. After unrolling a large fistful of toilet paper, he used a toilet brush to jam the paper into the drain at the bottom of the bowl, lifted up the cover on top of the tank, and then tinkered with the flapper valve so that the toilet wouldn’t stop running.

On his way out of the apartment, he made sure to leave the door unlocked.

Ten minutes later, a woman inside the chief engineer’s apartment began to cry out in alarm.

Mark listened from the stairwell, then backed down to the ground-floor landing when he heard the door to 301 swing open. A woman ran into the stairwell—on her way, Mark assumed, to investigate the source of the leak. When he heard her open the door to the third floor hall, he bounded up the stairs and let himself into the chief engineer’s apartment; in her rush, the woman had left the door cracked open.

“Hello?” he called out, just in case anyone was still inside. “I’m here about the leak.”

The place was laid out the same as the apartment above, so he ran down the hall to what he knew to be the first of five bedrooms, determined that it was just used for storage, and then ran to the next, which was set up as an exercise room.

When he poked his head into the master bedroom, he heard water dripping from the attached bathroom. After taking a second to study a photograph of a man he guessed was the engineer, posing with a middle-aged woman wearing stiletto heels, a silver tunic, and a beehive hairdo—likely the wife—he ducked into the adjacent bedroom, which was being used as a home office. The chief engineer was a tidy man, and it didn’t take Mark more than a minute to find a bank statement, filed in a cabinet to the left of the desk.

He snapped close-up photos of the statement, then replaced it, just as he heard footsteps and a woman’s voice.

“It just won’t stop, it just won’t stop! Vugar isn’t answering, I don’t know what to do!”

Mark slowly closed the door to the office, so that by the time the woman passed by on the way to the master bedroom, it was shut. With his ear to the door he listened.

“No, you need to come now! It’s not a little leak, it’s ruining the ceiling!”

Mark had been counting on the woman taking some time to deal with the toilet—she could have plunged it, or turned off the shutoff valve, or lifted the tank lid and reset the flapper…stopping a toilet from running wasn’t rocket science.

He cracked the door open just an inch. She was standing in the middle of the master bedroom, looking toward the attached bathroom, phone in hand, cataloguing—instead of trying to stop—the damage the water leak was causing.

It was the same woman Mark had observed in the photo, but now she was wearing a green velour tracksuit, and her shoulder-length hair was a mess. Mark wanted to shout at her
go back upstairs and deal with the damn toilet
. But after a minute, she just clicked off her phone and sat down on the king bed in the master bathroom, staring helplessly at the bathroom.

He risked opening the office door a little wider. Although she was fixated on the water cascading down from the bathroom ceiling, she’d see him if she turned her head ninety degrees. He thought for a moment; if she
did
see him, he’d claim to be here about the leak. As it happened, she didn’t turn, and the sound of falling water masked the sound of his footsteps as he retreated down the hall. He left the apartment, then jogged down three flights of stairs and out the back of the building.

Once he was back on the street, threading his way through the slow-walking sidewalk crowd, Mark used a prepaid cell to call John Decker.

“Hey, how’s it going, buddy?” Decker sounded as cheerful as ever. And like he was in the middle of eating a sandwich.

“I need you to make a wire transfer. You got a pen?”

“Ah, hold on.” Some chewing, a swallow, then, “So how ya been? Good and all?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. The transfer’s gonna be for ten grand.”

“Shit, I knew I had a pen around here somewhere.”

“I’ve got extras in the bottom left drawer.”

Some rustling and banging, then, “Got it. Shoot.”

“It’s the International Bank of Azerbaijan, Ganja branch.” Holding his phone in his right hand and his iPad in his left, Mark read off the account and routing numbers from the engineer’s bank statement, which he’d enlarged on the screen.

“When do you need this?”

“Now.”

“You got it, boss.”

“Send it from our UK Barclay’s overflow account, the one that we set up with just a number. I don’t want this traced back to our Bishkek operation.”

“Roger that.”