Death of a Spy (19 page)

Part Five

35

Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan

In the wide valley that lay below, sun glinted off the galvanized metal roofs of little houses that lay interspersed among fields of wheat and sugar beet. There were cows, but few sheep—at this time of year, the sheep would be in the high valleys, up in the mountains. On the western periphery lay a man-made irrigation pond.

Though the valley was fertile and welcoming, the badland hills around it were not. Bare and lifeless, they were marked by alluvial fans, and striped with multicolored layers of ancient rock and clay. Deep bone-dry ravines, scorched from the sun, lay between them.

To the northwest, Mark could see Ilan Dag—the rocky mountain where local legend said Noah’s ark first struck land, leaving a deep cleft in the top before landing on the slopes of Mount Ararat, in what was now eastern Turkey.

Wisps of white clouds hovered near the top of Ilan Dag’s twin summits. Mark glanced further west, thinking he might be able to glimpse the snow-covered slopes of Mount Ararat now that he’d gained some altitude, but it was too hazy.

It was only eight in the morning; in a few hours, he thought, the haze might burn off.

He’d been driving slowly along a newly paved road, but now he pulled off and parked on the dirt shoulder, a few feet away from a yellow natural-gas pipeline that followed the road. He’d flown into Nakhchivan the night before and checked into a cash-only hotel on the outskirts of Nakhchivan City. For the exorbitant price of forty dollars a day, the owner had been willing to let Mark use his car, a Renault sedan.

His cover story was that he worked for a Turkish firm that made plastic bottle caps. And that he was here to determine the market penetration and makeup of competitor caps in Nakhchivan.

He’d had business cards made up on the fly in Ganja, and then spent the night creating handwritten logs and entering fake data about bottle caps into his laptop. The gray sport coat he wore was a size too big for him, and his striped tie a bit too wide and too shiny—he was a poorly paid bachelor salesman trying to impress, but falling a little short.

On the front seat of his car were a hundred or so bottle caps in a plastic bag, each one individually labeled. Next to the bottle caps was a map, so that if a cop came by and questioned why he was hanging out on the side of the road—a distinct possibility, as Mark knew the cops in Nakhchivan were paranoid—he could grab the map and pretend to be lost.

In the meantime, his real focus was a slender ribbon of a dirt road about a mile away across the valley; after crossing the fields, it slipped behind a craggy hill and then led to the supposed location of the secret airstrip. He was looking for a car—any car—to emerge from behind the hill.

The first batch of satellite photos that Ted Kaufman had e-mailed him had just shown a green valley, surrounded by bare mountains, and ringed by a tall fence. A road—the road Mark was now watching—entered the valley from the south and ended at a small warehouse-like structure.

And that was it. No airstrip.

A second batch of satellite photos, however, taken some six months prior to the first set, revealed that a large portion of the valley had been covered with a long double line of massive tentlike structures, the effect of which was to hide from view whatever had been going on beneath the tents. And the road leading into the valley had been rutted by vehicles that had left tire tracks wide enough to suggest heavy-duty construction vehicles.

Three hours. That’s how long it took for the first and only vehicle—a beige sedan—to emerge from the valley. Mark couldn’t see who was in the car. He’d refrained from bringing binoculars, or even a decent camera, because having either one in his possession could arouse suspicion.

Surrounded by Iran and Turkey and Armenia, Nakhchivan was around eighty miles long and no more than forty miles across at its widest point. The Azeris were still technically at war with the Armenians—the mutual loathing between those two countries was legendary—and much of the region had just been a secret military zone during the Soviet era, so a siege mentality had developed, a sense among the population that if they let their guard down for even a moment, they would be overrun by the larger, and sometimes hostile, powers that surrounded them. Nakhchivanis were suspicious of foreigners, and people with cameras, and people who asked too many questions. So Mark knew he had to be careful.

He snapped a quick photo with his phone, then enlarged it enough so that he could see the front grill of the car—a Hyundai, he thought, as he deleted the image. Pulling off the shoulder of the road, he began driving slowly toward the main highway a few miles away, waiting for the car to catch up to him. He passed through a little village where roosters pecked at cow dung in the street.

When Mark saw the Hyundai approaching in his rearview mirror, he sped up a bit. The driver and front-seat passenger each wore a suit and tie and looked a bit like Mormon missionaries. The driver, who appeared to be the taller of the two, wore glasses. When the main highway appeared, Mark glanced in his rearview mirror again and saw that the driver had turned on his right blinker, so Mark turned right.

They were headed toward Nakhchivan City. To Mark’s left was the Aras River, which marked the border between Nakhchivan and Iran. To his right, in the distance, lay the snowcapped mountain range through which ran the war border with Armenia.

Wild red poppies grew on the side of the road, reminding Mark of Katerina, and the painting. Keal had left a message for him the night before. Contrary to what Kaufman had said, apparently the Bureau of Vital Records in Tbilisi had been able to provide some information about her—they’d received a copy of her birth record when she’d moved from Moscow to Tbilisi with her family in 1977. There was no current contact information, or any record of marriage or death, but Keal now knew that Katerina had been born on the eighteenth of July, and knew the names and birth dates of her parents; he was forwarding the information to the US embassy in Moscow and would also try searching a few more government databases in Tbilisi.

The highway was lightly trafficked and newly paved. Mark kept to the slow lane. When he passed the surveillance cameras along the side of the road—and there were several of them—he made sure that he was going just under the ninety kilometer an hour speed limit and looking away from the cameras. After a few miles, he reduced his speed enough so that the driver of the Hyundai decided to pass him.

36

Russian Military Base, South Ossetia

Dmitry Titov listened with intense interest as the deputy chief of the FSB’s counterintelligence division informed him that a CIA operative had arrived in Nakhchivan last night.

“And what is the source of this information?” Titov removed his new reading glasses. He’d resisted getting glasses for years, but he’d finally broken down last month when he’d found himself unable to read the morning paper.

“The reports officer we turned at the American embassy in Baku.”

In order to keep tabs on the Americans in the run-up to the upcoming operation in Nakhchivan, the counterintelligence division of the FSB, posing as Chinese intelligence officers, had recently abducted the wife of a CIA reports officer. As a method of recruiting a source—
we’ll kill your wife if you don’t spy for us
—it was a bit crude, but had proven to be effective, at least in the short term.

“He shared with you a report that this operative in Nakhchivan filed from the field?”

“No—it was a bit strange in that the intel came from a cable sent by Langley to the CIA’s chief of station in Baku, about an operation the CIA is running in Nakhchivan.”

“Cable from whom?”

“It had a routing address that we traced to head of the CIA’s Central Eurasia Division.”

Titov said, “This man is Kaufman, I know of him.”

“The cable was short. All it said was there was a singleton on contract leaving Ganja, arriving in Nakhchivan, and to expect no further reports for forty-eight hours.”

“Singleton on contract?”

“Probably refers to an intelligence agent operating on his own.”

“We don’t have a name.”

“No.”

But Titov wondered whether that was really true.

Sava was reported to be the CIA’s most knowledgeable and resourceful asset when it came to Azerbaijan. Titov hadn’t given much credence to that assessment when it had been originally rendered, but he’d been forced to reconsider when Sava had disappeared from Baku with such ease.

And now an unknown CIA officer had surfaced in Nakhchivan. The investigation in Bishkek hadn’t turned up anything definitive—although FSB men were now looking for an ex–Navy SEAL thought to be an accomplice of Sava’s—but Titov wondered whether the Bishkek angle had just been rendered moot.

“The new officer must be reporting directly to Kaufman,” concluded Titov. “And Kaufman is keeping Baku station informed. Ask counterintelligence whether they have the means to get the security tapes and flight manifests from the airport in Nakhchivan.”

37

Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan

Mark had first visited Nakhchivan City in the early 1990s, when he’d been a young officer in the CIA’s special activities division. Trade routes into Nakhchivan had been shut down because the war with Armenia had just started. Jobs had been scarce, and people had been hungry. The infrastructure, after all those years of Soviet rule, was in ruins, and there was no oil or gas in Nakhchivan to anchor the economy. What little help there had been had come from Baku, but that had been before the oil boom; Baku in the nineties had been beset by vicious political infighting, corruption, and above all else a lack of money. So they had been able to do little to prop up the struggling region.

Mark had stayed for a month, and had secretly helped funnel weapons to a group of Turks in Nakhchivan City, who in turn were arming the Azeris. When he’d come back to Nakhchivan ten years later as a CIA case officer, to try to convince a Turkish diplomat to spy for the CIA, the city had been in much better shape. Trade with Iran and Turkey had resumed. Roads were being repaired, and the gentrification of the capital had started.

But now…now Nakhchivan City was almost unrecognizable. All the old tenement houses—completely rebuilt. The ancient monuments—restored. The roads—all new. Nakhchivan was favored by the president of Azerbaijan, because his father had been born here. With the oil money now gushing in faster than Baku could handle, a healthy amount had been diverted to Nakhchivan City, more than any other city in Azerbaijan save Baku.

In the center of this new city stood the thirteen-story glass-clad Tabriz Hotel, the tallest building in all of Nakhchivan. When the Hyundai Mark was following turned into the Tabriz’s parking lot, Mark continued straight and parked in front of a pharmacy down the street. Then he jogged part of the way back to the hotel, slowing to an easy walk only when he was in sight of the entrance.

The lobby was a fair approximation of a reasonably upscale business hotel, but it was empty save for the two men in suits who’d been in the Hyundai. They stood in front of the reception desk.

Both were dark-haired, maybe thirty or so. Short-cropped hair, clean-shaven. The shorter of the two wore tortoiseshell eyeglasses. Both carried well-worn leather briefcases. Mark stood behind them, as if he too needed to speak to the receptionist.

“There’s a bowling alley and video arcade you can walk to,” Mark overheard the receptionist say, in Russian. “It won’t be open tonight, but tomorrow it should be.”

“We don’t bowl,” replied the taller one in Russian.

The bespectacled man rubbed his forehead. He looked as if he’d been up all night. “Forget entertainment then. Talk to us about dining options. Not for tonight, for now. The restaurant upstairs, we are tired of it.”

“You might try the Goy-Gol on Ataturk. It’s not far, you can walk.”

“Can you make a reservation?”

“Certainly, sir. But you won’t need one for lunch.”

The taller man frowned as he tapped the top of the concierge desk. “OK. Thank you.”

As the men turned to leave, Mark, speaking Russian, said, “I may join you, my friends, at the Goy-Gol, but don’t wait for me to start.” He smiled as he patted the bespectacled man on the shoulder.

The two men gave him a look. Mark, betting that they would just think he was being friendly to a fellow Russian, added, “I won’t keep you, I must check in myself, I just arrived. What a flight! Go, go. Don’t wait for me.”

As they were leaving, Mark heard one of them whisper something under his breath to the other. It was just a fragment of a remark, judging by the tone something equivalent to
idiot
, Mark guessed, but in a language he couldn’t place. Or maybe they’d been speaking Russian, but Mark just hadn’t been able to hear?

“Sir?” said the receptionist.

“I’d like a room.” Mark continued in Russian. He gestured over his shoulder to the two men who were walking out the entrance. “Next to my friends.”

The receptionist typed for a moment on his computer. “Room 816 is not a suite, but it does have a king bed.”

“I’ll take it.”

Mark handed over his Azeri passport.

Behind the reception counter, a door was cracked open. The receptionist called out “I need the key to 816,” and began to enter Mark’s information into a computer. After a minute, the receptionist called out, louder this time, “Salman! Room 816. Do you hear?” When this entreaty was met with more silence, the receptionist, looking aggrieved, retrieved a sheet of paper from a printer behind the counter and placed it in front of Mark. “Sign here,” he said. “
I
will get your key.”

The receptionist pushed open the door behind the counter, revealing two men standing in front of an old tube television. “Salman, you don’t have ears?”

“What?”

Mark glanced at the TV screen. On it, he saw aerial images of a bombed-out building surrounded by police cars. The logo on the upper right-hand corner of the screen told him it was the state-run AzTV channel. The program cut to what appeared to be a chaotic press conference hosted by a man Mark recognized as the president of Iran.

The receptionist returned to the counter, and handed a bulky metal key to Mark.

“What’s going on?” Mark asked.

“I am sorry to keep you waiting. As you can see, certain employees here are useless. If the Tabriz had to rely on them, the hotel would close.”

“I mean on the TV. What happened?”

“Oh, there was a bombing, of course.”

“In Iran?”

The receptionist shrugged as he took the sheet of paper Mark had signed and filed it in a cabinet beneath the counter. “Yes! Of course! Someone tried to kill Khorasani. It was his residence that was bombed.”

Ayatollah Khorasani was the supreme leader of Iran.

“How?”

“I don’t know. Some people say a missile, some a car bomb. Right now there are only rumors.”

“When did this happen?”

“This morning, before dawn. But it has only just come on the news. Of course, everyone thinks it is Israel.”

“This could be bad.”

“Yes, of course. But Khorasani was not at his residence, praise to Allah. He is alive, so I do not think there will be war.”