Death of a Spy (9 page)

“Did you bring a blanket?”

“Yes.”

Katerina approached him. Her hand was warm. They stole through the woods, picking a path through the underbrush and stepping over downed trees. When they got to the campsite, Marko took off his backpack and pulled out the blanket and two candles. He spread the blanket on the flat section of land he and Katerina had cleared a week earlier; the candles he lit and propped up in rocks that were marked by wax drips, evidence of their previous outing.

Katerina removed her satchel and placed it on the edge of the blanket. “Why are we here?”

“Shh.” Marko put a finger to his lips, then took off his shirt.

She wasn’t wearing a wire; that much became clear once they were naked. That, combined with the feel of her lips, and her hair brushing against his shoulder, and her breath melding with his own, deflated his anxiety and suspicion to the point where he didn’t want to confront her. But he had to, and before they began to make love. Katerina’s head rested on his chest, her ear was inches from his mouth.

“Earlier today I told you some things.” He paused a moment, listening to the forest, then asked, “Did you…tell anyone else about them?”

His whispered question caused her to stiffen. She lifted her head off his chest. He ran a hand through her hair and guided her head back down.

“What do you mean?”

“The listening device I found. How I’ve been helping the Press Club. Did you tell anyone—anyone—about all that?”

“No.” Her body tensed. Either she wasn’t trying to mask her uneasiness or she couldn’t. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you are the only person I confided in. But now other people know what I told you.”

“What other people?”

Marko took a while to respond. “Who do you think?”

“You…you are accusing me?”

“Not accusing, just telling you what has happened.”

“Who says that this has happened? Who?” When Marko didn’t respond, Katerina said, “The American with the money?”

“Yes.”

“He tells you this? He tells you I tell him your secrets?”

“No. He says you told others.”

“He lies.”

Marko had considered the possibility. He’d known Katerina longer than he’d known Larry.

“Does he?” asked Marko.

“He has to be lying.” Katerina lifted her head again. This time, when Marko tried to guide her back down to his chest, she straddled him, cradled his head in her palms and brought her face down next to his. Her bare sex was pressed against his own. He could barely see her face in the dim flickering candlelight. “He has to be,” she whispered.

“Get up,” said Marko.

“You don’t believe me.”

He put his index finger to his lips. Quiet.

Katerina didn’t resist when he gently pushed her off him. Naked, Marko stood to his full height, walked to beyond the edge of the blanket, and picked up Katerina’s bra. Before giving it to her, he felt every inch of the fabric.

“What are you—”

Marko put his finger to his lips again and flashed her a threatening look. When he was convinced the bra wasn’t wired with a listening device, he handed it to her. He did the same for all the rest of her clothing. She didn’t put any of it back on. It lay in a pile in front of her. Her head was lowered. Marko thought maybe she was crying.

When he finished with her clothes, he started inspecting every single item in her satchel—her art tools, her paints, a few pens, a little makeup kit, lip gloss, a spare sanitary napkin, loose change, a key that he’d given her to his apartment, a nail file, a schedule of her classes at Tbilisi State, a small pink leather wallet that contained thirty-six rubles, a few receipts, her driver’s license, and her internal Soviet passport.

She faced him, shaking her head, bottom lip quivering, definitely crying now.

It was in the satchel itself that he found it, sewn into one of the side seams, between the outer fabric and inner lining. It was unnoticeable except for a tiny bump. Marko used his teeth to rip the seam open, then fished out the device with his index finger. He held it up for a moment, examining it as best he could in the weak light. It was identical to the bug he’d found in his apartment.

He faced Katerina and held it up. She was looking at him now, but instead of crying, she appeared confused. In front of the blanket lay a fire pit ringed by small boulders. Holding the listening device gently in place with his lips, he picked up two rocks, and sat down in front of Katerina. He showed it to her, then placed it in her hands and stared into her eyes. She shook her head—whether to deny she knew anything about it, or because she was so stricken that she’d been found out, Marko couldn’t tell.

He took the bug back, placed it on top of one rock, and then smashed it with the other.

“How do you explain that?” he demanded. After such a long silence, the sound of the rocks smacking together, followed by his own voice—no longer a whisper—was jarring.

A long silence, then, “What was it?”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

Marko stared into her eyes, searching. “Guess.”

Her eyes began to well up with tears again. “A way for them to listen to us, but I don’t know about any of this, Marko! Why are you doing this to me? What have I done to you?”

“Does there need to be a why? Does there? Life is not a walk across a meadow, Katerina.” It was a common Russian saying that Katerina had told him her mother was fond of. “Shit happens.”

“Stop it.”

They faced one another for a long moment. Maybe it was her eyes, maybe it was the tone of her voice, or maybe he was just a sucker for tears. Whatever the reason, in that moment, Marko decided he believed her. He picked up the smashed bug.

“This is a listening device. Someone planted it in your bag.”

Katerina took it from him and examined the wires that came off of it.

“That’s the antenna,” said Marko, as if he really knew what he was talking about. He was pretty sure it was, though.

“I didn’t know, Marko. I swear it.”

He studied her expression as best he could in the flickering candlelight. “Do you have any idea who could have planted this?”

Katerina was silent for a moment. Her head dipped. “No. I take that bag with me everywhere.”

“It was sewn in. They would have needed to take it away from you. For at least a few minutes.”

“Maybe at school. Maybe someone took it when I was in class, or eating, and I just didn’t notice it. What happens now, Marko? What do we do?”

Marko had to think about that one. “We lay low. We live in your dorm, finish out the spring semester, and I stay away from the Press Club and the American.”

“And then you leave.”

It was true. Marko would go back to the States. While Katerina would stay here trapped in Georgia. He hated the thought of that. It would be one thing if she wanted to be a part of the revolution, to see it, to help drive it forward, but she didn’t. She just wanted to live, and paint.

“Would you ever want to come with me?”

She cocked her head, incredulous. “To the United States?”

“Yes.”

She was thinking hard, her brow furrowed, her eyes wide. “But I don’t know that they’d let me leave.”

Marko hesitated, and put some thought into what he said next. Worst comes to worst, he thought, even if it didn’t work out in the end between the two of them, at least she’d be safe. “If we were married they would.”

16

Tbilisi, Georgia
The present day

They’d just been kids, Mark thought, as he finished the last of his vodka and eyed a guy he was pretty sure had been assigned to watch him.

He hadn’t realized that at the time. He’d thought that he and Katerina had both crossed that bridge from childhood to adulthood years before. But he’d been wrong, he’d still been crossing it, and so had she. They’d been impulsive, and had confused stupidity with bravery, and hadn’t understood real-world consequences, and…

Mark ran a hand through his hair, thinking of that painting again, and of Katerina, and Daria, and Lila, and Larry, and Decker, and all the years he’d spent working for the CIA, and how different his life might have been had he never gone to Georgia in the first place.

The KGB had abducted him later that evening. In front of Katerina. Jack-booted thugs had broken down the door to her dorm room at four in the morning, when they’d both been asleep. He’d been dragged out onto the street, naked. Thrown into the trunk of a car. He could still hear Katerina’s screams and the sound of someone slapping her face.

He wanted to rid his mind of that ugliness, to cut that memory and a thousand others out of his brain.

The image of little Lila in her bassinet flashed into his head. He thought of Daria nursing his daughter as morning sunlight streamed in from the kitchen windows. He could smell the fresh coffee, hear it percolating, hear Daria speaking softly to Lila, “Easy there, easy there, you don’t have to drink so fast,” and it triggered within him a visceral eagerness to get back home with them both as soon as he possibly could.

Because, while he didn’t like to think it, Mark knew that beautiful calm, the essence of all that he loved, all that he wanted to protect and keep, could be gone in an instant.

If nothing else, his time in Georgia had taught him that.

Part Three

17

Tbilisi, Georgia

Mark was still at the airport in Tbilisi, waiting in line to board an Airbus jet, when a text came in from what appeared to be KyrgyzTelecom, indicating he qualified for a reduced rate plan. In reality, it was from Ted Kaufman. The message: make contact.

As eager as he was to get home, Mark was also well aware that Kaufman had thrown a lot of business his way. He knew he shouldn’t push his luck by completely ignoring his main source of income. So he left the boarding gate, picked up a Wi-Fi signal again outside the airport coffee shop, and used his jury-rigged iPad Mini to call Kaufman’s secure landline.

“So that job I was talking about,” said Kaufman.

“Throw a request for proposal together, I’ll look at it first thing—”

“The thing is, it might be related to what happened to Larry. I would think you’d at least want to hear me out now.”

“OK, but my plane is boarding as we speak. It’ll have to be quick.”

“I have a branch chief who’s stationed in Ganja, Azerbaijan. He was running a source, a twenty-eight-year-old woman. Two days ago, she was killed.”

Ganja, which lay about a hundred and thirty miles southeast of Tbilisi, was the second largest city in Azerbaijan. The last time Mark had been there it had been a chaotic dump. As far as he knew, it still was.

“I need,” added Kaufman, “for you to figure out why she was killed, and whether it was related to what happened to Larry.”

“Why can’t the branch chief investigate?”

“He’s come under some pressure recently. In fact, item one on the agenda would be to bring him an alias packet and see that he makes it out of Ganja without having a nervous breakdown. After you debrief him, of course.”

“What pressure?”

“There’ve been threats.”

“You want me to exfiltrate him?”

“It wouldn’t be a real exfiltration. As I understand it, he just needs a little hand-holding.”

“I’m not in the hand-holding business, and I’m not getting how this has anything to do with what happened to Larry.”

“Nakhchivan.”

“Still not following.”

“This source the branch chief was running was killed right before she was supposed to provide us with the financials for a construction company that had a big project going on in Nakhchivan.”

“And that’s it. That’s the connection. An airport security sticker and a construction project.”

“How often does an obscure place like Nakhchivan come up, Sava? And now it shows up on my desk in two separate reports—”

“I don’t recall writing a report—”

“You know what I mean. Two references to Nakhchivan, two people dead. I want you to find out why this woman in Ganja was killed. I’ll pay double your usual rate. Plus a bonus if—”

“I’ve been PNG’d from Azerbaijan, Ted. Remember?”

“Oh, shit. No, I forgot about that.”

“I’ve asked you twice to try to get it lifted.”

PNG stood for
persona non grata
. Mark had been declared one by the government of Azerbaijan over a year ago, as a result of an intelligence operation—involving oil politics and Iran—gone bad. Which meant he’d been kicked out of his adopted country and told never to return. Daria had been given a similar shove out the door. That’s why they’d moved to Bishkek.

“Yeah, now it’s coming back to me.”

Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, had been Mark’s
home
. He’d worked there for nearly a decade as an employee of the CIA, and then after quitting the Agency, had stayed on to teach international relations at a local university. Getting kicked out by the Azeris had been one of the worst developments in his life. Kaufman, however, clearly hadn’t lost any sleep over it.

“Point being,” said Mark, “I’m not going to be able to help you. Sorry.”

“What if I was able to get the PNG lifted?”

Mark had been about to check the time on his iPad—he had to get back in the boarding line soon. Instead, he said, “You could do that?”

“Sure. Probably. I think.”

“But I thought last you checked, the Azeris wouldn’t budge.”

“True, but that’s because you wouldn’t have been going back at the request of the US government. Whereas now you would.”

“You never even
requested
that they let me back in?”

“As I recall, I passed along your personal request. That’s different from an official request that comes from the State Department.”

“I’m aware of the difference, dammit. Thanks for dicking me around, Ted.”

“You take this job, I’d be putting in an official request now, I can guarantee you that.”

Mark didn’t respond right away. He thought again of Daria and Lila. And the frailty of the little life they had together. And then he thought about how much better that frail little life would be if they could all live in Baku instead of in permanent exile in Bishkek. Part of his job as a father was to think of the long term. “Diplomatic passport?”

“No. But I could probably swing an official one.”

“That’d work.”

“No diplomatic immunity, unless you want to really cozy up with State. I mean, you could try claiming it if you get in a jam, but I don’t know that State will back you up.”

“Even with an official passport, I’d need a visa for Azerbaijan.”

“I can have the embassy in Tbilisi start working on it now. Is that it? Are you saying you’ll do it?”

“No. The PNG. It’s lifted permanently. I’m not going in for a couple days and then getting tossed out again.”

“If you’re an approved contractor, working regularly with us, then it will probably stay lifted. But you start pissing people off again—and I’m warning you, the new ambassador in Baku is a bit of a pill—you’re going to get tossed again. That’s the best I can do.”

“Daria gets her PNG lifted too.”

“Whoa.”

“That’s a nonnegotiable.”

“You’re one thing, Mark. You’re one of us and always have been. Daria…”

“People do things in their youth that they regret.”

“She wasn’t that young, and she doesn’t regret shit.”

“You know, I got over all that. You can too.”

“I don’t know that I can even do it. With you, State can say you’re working under a government contract. The Azeris will respect that. With Daria, there’s no angle.”

“Then just say she’s working for me and do it all at once.”

“I don’t know, Mark.”

“She’s already pitching in on this project. Besides, didn’t you have your wife on payroll back in the nineties?” Mark knew he was pushing it, but if he couldn’t get Daria’s PNG lifted along with his own, then he couldn’t justify taking the job.

It was a pretty common practice in the CIA for officers to bring their spouses on board. Often they worked in the same office, and between the two of them got twice the pay for doing what was frequently substantially less than two jobs.

“That was when we were stationed in Moscow and raising two kids. And I needed an assistant I could trust.”

“Someone you could trust, but who had no exper—”

“There’s no need to go insulting my wife, Sava.”

“Just figure it out, Ted. Those are my terms.”