Death of a Spy (31 page)

68

Alarms began to sound all over Nakhchivan City. Army trucks rumbled through the streets.

The Azeri soldier Sava had called down to had radioed for backup. Titov and his men had disabled the elevator right after Sava had pulled his stunt, so the Azeri infantry men sent to investigate Sava’s claim had been forced to trudge up the stairs. After two were shot, the rest had fled, but minutes later, what Titov guessed was an entire infantry platoon had pulled up to the hotel and raced inside.

So the Azeris were coming; it was just a matter of time.

And the minute Titov saw the antiaircraft lighting up the sky to the north, he knew something else had also gone wrong. The Russian MiG fighter jets that had been assembled at the air base in Armenia weren’t supposed to be part of the incursion unless the Azeris used the few MiG fighter jets they had stationed in Nakhchivan to attack the advancing Russian ground forces. The MiG made a distinctive sound, audible from many miles away, but Titov couldn’t hear any in the air.

In fact he couldn’t hear any fighter jets in the air.

Which meant there should be no need for antiaircraft fire at all. But there
was
antiaircraft fire, so something had to be up there, way up high, where it couldn’t be heard. The randomness of the antiaircraft fire suggested that whatever it was couldn’t be seen by radar any more than it could be heard.

Which meant the Azeris had, at the last minute, found someone to help them. The Turks, perhaps, or more likely, the Americans. FSB counterintelligence would eventually find out who—their mole in the US embassy probably already knew—but by then it might not matter.

Titov’s satellite phone began to ring. Ignoring it, he walked to the emergency stairwell.

One of his men was still positioned to the side of the door, waiting to shoot up the stairwell should Sava show himself. Before seeing the antiaircraft fire lighting up the sky, and hearing what sounded like aerial bombs exploding, Titov had planned to order his men to take the roof. But given what was going on at the border, he’d decided on a different course of action.

He slung an AKS assault rifle with a strap on it over his shoulder, stuck two extra thirty-round magazines in the pocket of his armored vest, pulled his combat knife from his ankle holster, and affixed his night-vision goggles to his head, but with the dual tubes flipped up.

“I recommend you step back, sir,” whispered the operative guarding the door. “The stairs are not secure. If you—”

“Dammit.”

Titov was trying, using his knife as a lever, to pry the top hinge pin from the bullet-riddled metal door that led from the restaurant to the stairs. The door was thick heavy steel, designed to stop fires from penetrating the hallway; though it was pockmarked with bullet holes on one side, there were no exit holes on the opposite side.

Titov’s throbbing right thumb was useless because of Sava’s bite. He transferred the knife to his left hand. It took him a couple of minutes, but eventually he managed to work all the pins out. He pulled the door off its hinges.

“I’m going up,” said Titov. The metal fire door had been overengineered; as a result, it was exceptionally heavy. With his useless thumb, he struggled to keep it off the ground. “Cover me.”

“Sir, I wouldn’t recommend that.”

“I said, cover me.”

Titov stepped into the stairwell and eyed the door that led to the roof. Sava appeared to have attempted to shut it, but because the latch had been shot up, it remained cracked open an inch. As Titov slowly climbed the stairs, lugging the door up with him, he considered the layout of the roof.

Sava would be positioned so that he had a clear shot of anyone trying to access the roof from the stairwell. Because of the way the door opened, that meant the American would have to be somewhere to the right. So what was to the right?

A big air-conditioning condenser, that was what.

With that in mind, and using the fire door as a shield, he bounded up the last remaining steps, kicked open the door to the roof, and burst through it—holding the fire door between himself and where he thought Sava would be.

69

Mark had been faking exhaustion when he’d been with Titov in the restaurant, but he wasn’t faking it now. He was seated, leaning up against one of several large rooftop air-conditioning condensers. While the condenser probably wouldn’t stop a bullet, it was at least a decent blind and might also help mask the heat of his body. The rifle he’d taken from Titov was equipped with a thermal sight, making it likely the rest of the Russians had been issued similar equipment. But the heat was also making him sweat; he felt light-headed, and his heart was beating faster than it should have been.

He was trying not to move any more than he already had, so as not to disturb the flexible plastic tube protruding from his chest. Although he could still breathe well enough, his left lung ached, and he worried that he’d further damaged it when fighting Titov. He desperately wanted to rip the tube out—it felt as though he’d been shot in the chest with an arrow—but knew better than to act on his instinct.

An involuntary shudder swept through him. He thought of Daria, and how they’d strolled through the streets of Florence on what had passed for a honeymoon, recalled how they’d started most mornings taking long breakfasts, him downing double espressos, she with her cappuccino… He’d been uncharacteristically calm, and happy, and content to just let time pass; he’d never been to Italy before and maybe because of that, because he had no history there that could have come back to bite him, he hadn’t been constantly looking over his shoulder. As his thoughts turned back to the present, he pictured Daria back in Bishkek with Lila, holed up somewhere safe, he hoped, and he steeled himself to the task of guarding his position and holding onto consciousness. At least the light show he’d seen in the northern sky suggested that the Russians were encountering—

The door to the roof burst open.

Mark fired two quick shots at someone who appeared to be using a metal door as a shield. The man made it to a second air-conditioning condenser and dropped the door in front of it.

“Enough, Sava!” cried a voice in Russian, a voice Mark recognized. “You are surprised I am alive, no? Well, there is this thing they make now, armor that can stop bullets. You wear it like a vest. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”

Mark didn’t respond to the sarcasm. Instead, he focused on the sounds around and below him, listening for evidence that Titov was advancing, or was just talking to cover the approach of another assailant.

“Ceramic armor, Russian kind. Very good quality. I recommend it to you.”

Titov spoke flippantly, but in a way that seemed to border on mania.

“You’ve got big problems,” said Mark. “The Azeris are coming. There will be more than your men can handle.”

“You don’t know my men, Sava. And my own reinforcements will also be coming soon.
Spetsnaz
GRU from our base in Yerevan, the very best. If I were you, I would not be so confident.”

Mark wasn’t feeling the slightest bit confident. And
spetsnaz
GRU troops, elite special forces culled from the military intelligence branch of the Russian army, were no joke. “There is fighting in the north. Heavy fighting.” He tried not to sound as drained as he felt.

“I have seen it.”

“That does not bode well for you.”

“I do not know what it bodes, nor do you. All I know is that I have been ordered to secure the roof of this hotel, so one of our helicopters can land here. If you are still alive when it arrives, that will mean I have failed. But still, the men inside the helicopter will kill you.”

“The hell they will.”

“There will be too many of them, even for a slippery person like you. So either way, if I kill you first or they kill you later, it is the same for you.” A long silence, then, “And if these men don’t come, well…yes, you are right, that will mean the invasion has failed, in which case things will not be so good for me, you understand? If you don’t kill me, well, the Azeris will.”

Mark didn’t answer.

Titov said, “So, Sava, will you try to kill me now?”

Mark still didn’t answer.

“Katerina was my half sister, by the way. I don’t think you knew that. We shared the same mother, but had different fathers—my father died when I was two, then my mother remarried and had Katerina. She was ten years younger than me.”

The words just hung there in the thick air. The heat from the condenser stuck in the back of Mark’s throat, making it difficult for him to swallow. The fact that Katerina and Titov were related was a shock, but less of a shock than what Titov’s words implied.

“
Was
your sister?” said Mark. When Titov didn’t answer, Mark asked, “What do you mean
was
? What happened to her?”

More sirens sounded from down below. Mark heard tires screeching in the front lot of the Tabriz. He glanced north, but couldn’t see any more evidence of fighting.

Titov said, “Some might say I killed her. I resisted that thought for years, but now I’ve come to accept that yes, in a way I did kill her.”

“What did you
do
?” Mark took a deep breath and decided he didn’t feel as lousy as he’d thought. He certainly still had the energy to kill Titov.

“She didn’t know about me. She just thought I worked at the embassy.”

Mark tried to remember back that far. He thought, yes, Katerina
had
talked of an older brother. He recalled her saying that her mother and brother supported the Soviet Union, and that she was afraid they wouldn’t like him, because he was an American. So she’d never taken him to meet them. Mark had been too absorbed with Katerina to care.

“What didn’t she know about you?”

“When I was twenty-one I was pulled from university in Moscow and sent to the war in Afghanistan. After the war, the commander of my tank battalion was recruited to work for the KGB. He brought me with him.”

Remembering what Orkhan had told him, Mark said, “You dealt heroin in Afghanistan. Your commander was your
krisha
, and still is. He is the director of the FSB. That is why you are here.”

“This is true. I am not proud of everything I have done, but I will not deny it. Katerina never knew I was a KGB officer, though. She just thought I was in the army, and then worked at the embassy in Tbilisi.”

A thought suddenly occurred to Mark. “Did Katerina know about your history with heroin?”

“No.”

“The painting of the poppy—it wasn’t a message?”

“I wondered the same thing once, but no. I don’t see how she could have known. I look at a poppy and I see seeds that can be made into a drug. She sees a pretty flower.” Titov let a weary sigh escape. “It was a mistake for me to have come to Tbilisi, where Katerina was, where my mother was. But I did not choose the posting. And, of course, I didn’t ask her to get close to you, do you understand? I didn’t intend to use her like that. But when she told me she was seeing an American, well, of course I was going to investigate who this American is, and why he was in Georgia. She was my sister. And when I investigated, I learned things about you. I learned that you associated with bad people at the university, people who would cause trouble, so I made sure you were watched closely, and then I saw you met with this Bowlan man who we knew was CIA…I should have told Katerina to break it off then. I should have told her you were dangerous.”

“Not to her I wasn’t.”

“But I made a mistake. I told my superiors about Katerina’s relationship with you. And they insisted that we use her to learn more about you, and what you were doing with Larry Bowlan. You understand, being in the KGB, this was a very good job for me. I alone was supporting my mother, helping to pay for Katerina to go to school.”

“You—
you
were the one who planted the bug on her?”

“So, yes, I planted this listening device on her. And this was my mistake. Because if I hadn’t involved her in my world, she would never have been targeted.”

“What happened to her?”

“She was killed the same day that you were freed.”

Mark felt his heart rate quicken as he anticipated what Titov was going to say next.

“You see,” said Titov, “your friend Larry Bowlan, he didn’t just arrange for those Georgian criminals—”

“They were Georgian patriots fighting an occupation.”

“Ioseliani and his men were criminals!” Titov’s voice trembled. “Bowlan didn’t just arrange for those Georgian
criminals
to attack and kill the men who were holding
you
prisoner. He also arranged for them to kill…”

Titov stopped in midsentence, unwilling or unable to finish.

“Katerina,” said Mark. “You’re saying Larry Bowlan arranged to have her killed?”

Could Bowlan have done it? A man Mark had considered a friend for twenty-four years?

The answer, Mark knew, was
yes
. If Bowlan had thought Katerina was a willing agent of the KGB, and not just the unwitting half sister of one, he could have done it.

“Yes. That criminal son of a bitch Bowlan and his gang of criminals had her killed! Because of her association with me. For years I looked for him…”

Mark was too old, and too weathered, to cry anymore, but if he’d been twenty years younger, he might have now. In the years right after leaving Georgia in 1991, whenever he’d thought of Katerina, he’d imagined her living a happy life somewhere. Falling in love with someone who was kind to her, painting for pleasure, taking joy in beauty, aging with grace. Maybe even thinking of him every so often. Their relationship had been transitory, but in the end, what relationship wasn’t? What mattered was that, for a time, however brief, they had loved each other.

He wanted to bridge the gap of time, to go back and comfort her, to let her know that he was sorry about what had happened, and that he wished her well.

“Our mother never recovered, you know,” said Titov. “The death of Katerina was too much for her to bear. She only lasted a year.”

Mark let his head hang as he recalled the lethal efficiency with which the team of Georgian men who’d rescued him had dispatched his Russian captors. It sickened him to think that Katerina had met a similar fate. It was such a shitty, mean thing. Why God or fate had allowed him to survive for so long, when others more deserving had long since passed, was beyond him.

He realized he was breathing quickly, almost to the point of hyperventilating.

“The painting,” Mark said. “Where—”

“I found it in Katerina’s dormitory room. It was still wet, she must have just finished it before she was murdered. I gave it to our mother. She lit a candle next to it every day until she died. When I inherited her house, I stored the painting in the attic over all the years I rented the place out. I thought I was saving it because I couldn’t bear to throw it out. But now I know it was so that I could bring it to the Dachi hotel, so it could be the last thing that son of a bitch Larry Bowlan saw before
he
died.”

She’d been one of the innocents, thought Mark, collateral damage in a cold war that had already gone on for far too long, a war that had already destroyed far too many lives. Her death hadn’t even helped to end that war; it had been utterly pointless.

Titov was quiet for a long, long time. Mark listened to the shouts and sirens in the city, and the sound of sporadic gunfire below them.

Just when Mark was beginning to wonder whether Titov was through talking, the Russian added, “Life is funny, Sava.”

Mark closed his eyes, leaned his head against the warm condenser, and let both his pistol and assault rifle rest loosely in his lap. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it sure is.”