Death of a Spy (22 page)

46

Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan

Mark heard footsteps on gravel, then, “Welcome, General Titov.”

For the past several hours Mark had been thinking of Daria, hoping that she’d gotten his message, and that she and Lila were someplace safe. He’d also been wondering whether he was too far underground for his prepaid to transmit a signal.

Now he had the sense that someone was staring at him. No one spoke for a good minute.

Then, “Uncover his head.”

The canvas sack was yanked off. Mark blinked as his eyes adjusted. He was in what appeared to be a mine. But it wasn’t a dirty mine, where coal or iron ore was being extracted. Instead the ceiling and walls appeared to be made of grayish, translucent crystal.

“It’s salt,” said a man in Russian-accented English. He stood behind Mark. “It keeps the air clean, and dry. People who have lung trouble come here to breathe. We’re on the women’s side. It’s nicer.”

Which explains all the beds, thought Mark. There were maybe a hundred of them, lined up in two perfectly straight rows down the length of a long cavern. The beds were all metal framed. Polyester blankets imprinted with a floral pattern were spread over each one. A string of dim, bare-bulb lights ran down the apex of the cavern’s low arched ceiling.

“Turn around.”

That voice—Mark had a sense that he’d heard it before, but he struggled to place where. He turned.

A man sat, or rather slouched, on a bed about six feet away. He was of average size, but muscular in a flinty, weathered way. His eyes were blue, cheekbones high, lips thin, forehead prominent, gray hair crew-cut short. He wore gray slacks, shiny black wingtip shoes, and a too-tight short-sleeved collared dress shirt that accentuated his muscular torso and arms. In his right hand was a big black semiautomatic Grach pistol; he held it lazily, resting it on his right thigh in a way that said he wasn’t the slightest bit afraid of anything Mark might do.

“Why do they call you bootlicker?” Mark asked in English.

“What?”

“Your men. Why do they call you this? Whose boots do you lick?”

Turning to the guards behind him, Titov snarled in Russian, “You idiots! You talk in front of him? He understands Russian.”

“He lies, sir,” said one of the guards. “No one said—”

“Leave us!”

Mark studied his captor. Switching to Russian, he said, “Have we met before?”

Instead of answering, Titov took a manila folder that lay beside him on the bed and tossed it to Mark. “Open it.”

The folder hit Mark’s shin and fell to the ground. Mark leaned forward to pick it up, forcing himself not to wince as a bolt of pain from his broken ribs shot up his side.

Titov shifted his gun arm slightly, so that the barrel was aimed at Mark’s head. “You haven’t changed much, considering the years,” he observed. “Not so much, at least, that I wasn’t able to recognize you when I reviewed the tape.”

Mark pulled a large glossy color photograph out of the envelope. It was grainy—a single frame grabbed from what he guessed was a video—but he had no problem recognizing himself. He was at the Dachi hotel in Tbilisi, in the room where Larry Bowlan had been found dead. And he was looking at Katerina’s self-portrait.

He studied the photo, then Titov. “Recognized me from what? From when?”

“Katerina, you can’t really see her face, but her hair, her figure, she looks beautiful there, no?”

Ordinarily, Mark tried to control an interrogation—even if he was the one being interrogated—by trying to assess what the interrogator wanted to hear and tailoring his answers accordingly. But in this case, he hadn’t a clue as to what Titov was after. Or why he was after it. Which meant he was in danger of giving a wrong answer.

He observed the tension in Titov’s jaw, saw that the pistol that rested on his thigh was now gripped a little tighter.

“Answer my question,” said Titov.

“I don’t like the tone of your question. Did you kill my friend?”

“Friend? What friend?”

“Larry Bowlan.”

“That pig? Yes, of course I killed him. He was foolish to have come back to Georgia. I gave him an injection of sux—you know this drug?”

Mark did. Succinylcholine—sux for short—was a muscle relaxant that induced complete paralysis, including in muscles needed to breathe. In hospitals, it was given to patients just prior to inserting a breathing tube attached to a mechanical ventilator; outside of hospitals, it was used to kill people, mainly because it was hard to detect in toxicology tests. Mark recalled that the Mossad had been caught using sux to assassinate a Hamas operative in Dubai a few years earlier.

Titov added, “I watched him suffocate to death while looking at Katerina’s painting. His brain was working just fine, but he couldn’t breathe. He looked like a fish out of water.” Titov made a fish mouth with his lips. “Urinating all over himself. I enjoyed this very much.”

Mark eyed Titov. “What does Katerina have to do with this? Where is she?”

“I took a risk killing—” Titov stopped in midsentence. For the first time, he looked genuinely surprised. “What did you ask me?”

“What the hell does Katerina have to do with this?”

Speaking slowly, as if incredulous that Mark had dared to pose such questions, Titov said, “Where
is
she?” Titov stood. Gesticulating with his Grach pistol, he said, “You mean to tell me you don’t…” He shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”

“I knew a woman named Katerina Kustinskaya twenty-four years ago, when I was a student in Georgia. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”

Titov leaped forward and swung his pistol down hard. Mark blocked the blow with his forearm and dove into Titov, who clobbered him on the back of his head with the pistol and sent a knee up into Mark’s face. Mark stumbled, then felt the barrel of the pistol on the back of his head.

You sonofabitch
, thought Mark.
I’m going to pay you back for that.

“Don’t you dare move,” said Titov, as he maneuvered himself behind Mark while keeping the pistol barrel tight on Mark’s skull. Then, in a manic voice just short of a shout, he said, “This is the end of your time on this earth. No God will save you. Your pleas for mercy will go unanswered. After you die, and your blood stains the earth, you will be buried in a trash heap. No one will mourn you, no one will care.”

Mark felt the barrel of the pistol lift off the base of his skull.

Titov said, “Now do you remember who I am?”

47

Tbilisi, Georgia
June 1991, six months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union

Marko Saveljic had never used heroin of any kind before, hadn’t even smoked it, but he’d seen enough doped-up vagrants on the streets of his hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to know that it was possible to take the drug in doses that left one reasonably functional.

But the KGB thugs who’d kidnapped him, just hours after he’d discovered the listening device in Katerina’s art bag, clearly hadn’t been aiming for him to remain functional. After an initial interrogation and beating, the results of which evidently hadn’t been satisfactory because it had been followed by a second interrogation and beating, they’d spent weeks—two? three? Marko had lost all track of time, but a glance at all the needle marks on his arm told him that it had been awhile—injecting as much heroin in him as his body could take, as often as his body could take it. Sometimes the initial rush of the drug had been so strong that he’d started choking before floating down into that warm painless netherworld…

But the night before, the injections had abruptly stopped.

When he’d been high they hadn’t bothered to beat him. Perhaps because it was pointless to inject someone with a powerful painkiller and then try to inflict pain. But now he knew that, while he felt no pain when high on heroin, the pain was magnified tenfold when coming off it.

When they started interrogating him again, he tried to answer their questions, he really did, but the problem was he had no good answers. So they beat him again, and again, sometimes with a rubber truncheon, sometimes with their fists.

He told them now as he had before all about his meetings with the American named Larry, and about funneling money to the Press Club, he told them everything he could remember, every little detail, but that wasn’t enough. They were convinced he actually worked for the CIA, that he knew more.

He even tried to make up things about the CIA, to tell them what they wanted to hear, but he didn’t know enough about the CIA to make his lies believable.

They gave him breakfast—water and stale salted crackers—but he threw everything up as a jaw-rattling fever and intense stomach cramps came upon him. He felt like he needed to shit, but his body hurt all over, hurt too much to squat over the bucket that sat by his head and which was already full with his excrement.

He moved his cheek a few inches, so that it lay on a new, cooler patch of concrete. Maybe they were done with him. Maybe they’d finally realized that he had nothing left to tell them.

A door opened. Light spilled in. Someone kicked him.

“Get up.” This in Russian.

Marko couldn’t get up.

A hand clasped his hair, yanked him to a kneeling position, and pulled him in the direction of the door.

Outside, four men wearing black ski masks stood around a fifth who was kneeling in the dirt, face uncovered, arms handcuffed behind his back. All the men with the ski masks were armed.

“I want them facing each other,” said the man who, even with the ski mask on, Marko recognized as the leader. He recognized the blue eyes, and the slope of the muscular shoulders, and the pattern of scuff marks on his black boots.

Someone pulled Marko a few more feet forward, until he was facing a young man with shoulder-length brown hair, swollen lips, and teary, bruised brown eyes.

The leader gave Marko a sharp kick in the thigh. “You have been unhelpful. This is what we do to bitches that are unhelpful.” He removed a black semiautomatic pistol from an exposed shoulder holster, aimed it at the back of the head of the unnamed prisoner, and in Russian said, “This is the end of your time on this earth. No God will save you.” The prisoner began to shake. “Your pleas for mercy will go unanswered. After you die, and your blood stains the earth, you will be buried in a trash heap. No one will mourn you, no one will care.”

And then, just like that, the trigger was pulled. The bullet traveled through the back of the prisoner’s head, out the front of his nose, and into the dirt between Marko’s knees. As the prisoner slumped forward into Marko, he drooled blood on Marko’s shoulder.

“OK, now it’s your turn,” said the leader to Marko. “Are you prepared?”

The strange thing, thought Marko, was that, yes, he was prepared. He was so tired, and in so much pain, that he was ready for it all to end.

48

Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan
The present day

“You,” said Mark, now recognizing the eyes, and the voice—even the slope of the shoulders—of the man who’d tortured him all those years ago. He’d never known the Russian’s name. He did now.

Titov.

Mark had been sure he was going to die that day, but instead he’d just heard the click of a firing pin descending on an empty chamber. In the weeks that followed, the Russians had executed five more men in front of him, some old, one even younger than the first had been. His captors—whose names Mark had never known—hadn’t told him where the men had come from, or why they were being executed. Mark had hoped they were criminals who’d been given the death penalty, and that the Russians had just been carrying out executions that would have occurred anyway, but he’d never known for sure.

Titov had gone back to sitting on the bed. “So all that time, you were lying. You
were
working for the CIA. As you are working for them—or with them—now. Don’t try to deny it. I know about your operation in Bishkek, about your Navy SEAL friend, the work you do for the CIA there. I’ll know even more soon.”

As Mark stared at Titov, horrified to be face to face with him again and to hear him mention the city where his wife and daughter resided, he recalled that his imprisonment in Georgia had taught him an important lesson—that the only way to avoid being completely controlled by monsters was to stop caring about what they might do to you. He’d gotten to that point in Georgia, when he’d accepted—and even welcomed—his own death, and he’d carried that feeling with him throughout much of his career with the CIA. It was at the very heart of what had made him a good CIA officer.

With Lila in the picture, though, he’d changed. Even if his own life wasn’t worth worrying about, his daughter’s certainly was, and her fate was tied in some small way to his own. He couldn’t provide for her and protect her if he was dead.

At least that’s what he’d been telling himself—until now. With Titov standing in front of him, bragging about how he’d been poking his nose around Bishkek, Mark felt a nearly overwhelming urge to rip the Russian’s throat out, consequences be damned.

Mark eyed Titov for a moment, then said, “When I was a student in Tbilisi, I was helping Larry Bowlan, and Bowlan was working for the CIA. I knew nothing about operations outside of the one I was involved in. I told you everything I knew back then, but you were too stupid to realize I was telling the truth.”

The insult didn’t appear to affect Titov. “You came back to Georgia within two years of leaving. You were spotted in Abkhazia.”

“By then I
was
working with the CIA. But when you knew me I was just being used by the CIA, by Bowlan.”

“After we kidnapped you, Bowlan searched for you. He sent men to rescue you. He wouldn’t have done that if you were just someone he was using.”

“He did.” Bowlan had leveraged his connections to Georgian rebels to put together a proxy hit squad that had hunted down and decimated the KGB in Tbilisi. All of Mark’s captors had been slaughtered; Titov had only survived because he hadn’t been there at the time.

Mark and Titov stared at each other for a while.

Titov asked, “What happened to you, after you escaped?”

“Why do you want to know?” Mark didn’t understand why they were talking about his distant past instead of the secret military zone in Nakhchivan, or the buildup of Russian forces in the region, or why Titov had killed Larry Bowlan five days ago. And he still didn’t understand what any of this had to do with Katerina. There were too many questions.

Titov didn’t answer.

Mark asked, “Why do you care about all this ancient history?” The two men stared at each other for a while, then Mark said, “I went back to the United States, kicked the heroin, and joined the CIA. Larry Bowlan recommended me, made sure I was taken care of.”

“I mean before that, after Bowlan rescued you, but when you were still in Georgia.”

“Nothing. I just left Georgia.”

“You are so full of lies, Sava.”

“I didn’t finish my Fulbright, I didn’t do anything.”

“You just left.” Titov words were undergirded with sarcasm.

“The people who freed me—”

“You mean the people who killed my men.”

“—dropped me off on the streets of Tbilisi. I tried to go back to my apartment, but I’d been away for over two months and it had been cleaned out and re-rented. You know what I looked like, you know what you did to me. I could barely stand. I was going through withdrawal. I needed a fix but I didn’t have the slightest idea where to get one. So I sat outside the door to my old apartment and just…did nothing. The landlady tried to get me to leave, even threatened to call the cops. Your men got to her, I know, that’s why she would barely look at me. I told her I’d leave, but only if she let me use her phone. I tried to call Katerina, but I couldn’t get through to her. I walked out onto the street—Katerina’s apartment was over a mile away, and I didn’t think I could make it there, but I was going to try, and that’s when Larry Bowlan picked me up.”