Death of a Spy Read online

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

  He scrolled down, skimming over each section. ASSETS, CURRENT LIABILITIES, CONTRACT REVENUE… 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 NAKHCHIVAN.

  “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 GENERAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE EXPENSES—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.”

  33

  At four that afternoon, Mark observed the chief engineer of Bazarduzu Construction hurrying down the street towards his apartment, carrying a briefcase in his right hand. His eyes looked angry. His thin gray hair was unruly.

  “As we discussed,” said Mark to his cab driver.

  Mark stepped out of the cab and bumped into the engineer, as though he hadn’t been watching where he was going. As he did so, he said, “Check your bank account.”

  “What?”

  “I made a deposit today. It should cover the cost of the damages.”

  “Who are you?”

  “A friend.”

  Mark walked back to the cab, leaving the engineer standing in front of his building, staring at Mark, a confused expression on his face. As the cab driver pulled away, he handed a camera back to Mark.

  “Where to, sir?”

  Mark slipped him a hundred dollar bill. “End of the street is fine.”

  Mark bought a Turkish coffee and loitered in the park opposite the engineer’s apartment, eyeing the people going in and out. After a half hour—more than enough time, he figured, for the engineer to have checked his bank balance—he got up off his bench, intending to go have a chat with the man. But as he was crossing the street, a guy in a Bazarduzu Construction truck pulled up. Guessing that he was there to inspect the damage caused by the overflowing toilet, and that the engineer would be occupied with that for a while, Mark bought another coffee and returned to his bench. As he waited, his thoughts turned back to Daria and Lila. If the engineer knew why Aida Tagiyev had been killed, and what this whole Nakhchivan business was about, Mark thought he might be able to wrap everything up tonight and catch a flight from Baku to Bishkek as early as tomorrow morning.

  After an hour, the guy who’d pulled up in the Bazarduzu Construction truck left, prompting Mark to head once again towards the engineer’s apartment. This time, however, his plans were upended when he observed the engineer and his wife leaving their building on foot.

  Mark, seeing them before they saw him, turned back to the park, and then shadowed the couple to a crowded, dimly lit restaurant where the walls had been decorated with lots of plastic red-leafed maple-tree branches, and an advertisement for Xirdalan beer hung above the bar. In the open kitchen in back, two young men in white aprons and tall white chef hats were cooking lahmajoon—the Turkish version of pizza—in a wood-fired oven. Between them, a buxom woman with flour-covered hands fed bread dough through a double roller.

  Mark took a seat at the bar and ordered a half-liter bottle of Xirdalan.

  “And I’ll buy drinks for the couple dining in the back.” Mark gestured with his head and put a twenty-manat note down on the bar. “Whatever they want.”

  The bartender, a slender, dark-complexioned Azeri woman, shrugged. “OK.”

  The engineer looked up after the bartender delivered the offer. Mark met his gaze, then nodded when the engineer appeared to recognize him.

  The offer of a drink was declined, but minutes later, the engineer approached Mark at the bar.

  “Who are you?”

  “You checked your bank account?”

  “Why would you do such a thing?”

  The tone was accusing, incredulous.

  “I want to show you something.” Mark pulled his iPad out of his satchel, opened it on the bar, and clicked on the Excel file. Mark slid the iPad over. “Take a look.”

  The engineer’s eyes widened, and his nostrils flared, as he examined the screen. “How did you get this?”

  “Of course, this is just a backup. The original is safe with my colleagues. You made three hundred and sixty-seven thousand manats last year, I see.”

  The engineer smiled weakly at his wife, who was staring at them from across the restaurant. “You stole this information, I presume?” Without waiting for an answer, he added, “Do you know who I am?”

  Although the engineer spoke in Azeri, he did so in a stiff, formal tone that came across as haughty, the way a nonnative speaker might. Educated abroad, Mark concluded, probably in England.

  “I know you’re a Javadov.”

  Javadov was the last name of the local ex-com.

  “I am.”

  “You asked whether I stole this. I didn’t. You did, though. And then you sold it to me. For the ten thousand dollars that you see in your account.”

  “I see,” said the engineer calmly.

  “Do you?”

  “I see that you are attempting to blackmail me. It won’t work, of course. In fact, I think you would be wise—”

  Mark opened his iPad and a photo appeared. “Here we are together, meeting outside your apartment, just after ten thousand dollars was transferred to your account. That’s when you passed me the information.”

  “You embarrass yourself,” said the engineer, but he looked stricken.

  “Four days ago, an employee of Bazarduzu Construction—Aida Tagiyev—was murdered. Perhaps you heard of her death.”

  “No.”

  Mark watched for signs that would suggest the engineer was lying; he saw none.

  “She was killed because of the information you see on my computer. Because she tried to steal it and sell it. Now, consider what might happen if it gets out that you gave me this information—”

  “This girl. Who killed her?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “I couldn’t begin to guess. And no one will believe that I gave you this information. Do you understand that? I am a Javadov.”

  The clear implication being that his relationship with the ex-com would insulate him from suspicion. Mark wasn’t buying it—people in power were usually the most suspicious of family members. Kings weren’t deposed by peasants, they were deposed by their kin.

  “What I understand is that if you don’t help me, I will call Bazarduzu and offer to sell this financial information back to them. When I do this, the ex-com will have his men trace the call to my hotel. When they search my room, they will find copies of reports I’ve written, detailing how I recruited you to spy for me.”

  “Spy for you,” repeated the engineer. “Ridiculous. And in this fantasy, who exactly might you be that I would agree to do this?”

  Ignoring the question, Mark said, “There will be photographic evidence and bank receipts. Now, you might be thinking, you can just go to the ex-com now, to neutralize whatever evidence his men might find against you. But know that this photograph of us together”—Mark pointed to the iPad—“is just one of many. I have been following you for several weeks. When you had dinner two Saturdays ago at the Elnur, I was there standing behind you as you walked in, when you picked up your shirts from the cleaners on Vagif Street three weeks ago, I was there, close enough for us to have been talking. All that has been documented by people I work with, photographed, so I could report to my superiors that I was making progress in recruiting you.”

  The engineer had used a debit card tied to his bank account to make several purchases over the past month, and those charges had shown up on his bank statement.

  “I don’t think…” The engineer shook his head as though angry, but now he was clearly unnerved. His voice trailed off.

  “I’ll add another five thousand dollars to your account. But that’s my final offer.” Carrot and stick. “You have a choice to make.”

  “I don’t want your money.”
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  “I know. Bazarduzu completed a project in Nakhchivan last year. I need to know what that project was. When you give me what I need, all this unpleasantness goes away. No one will know that we ever spoke.”

  The engineer cast another glance at his wife, looking as though he hoped she’d come to his rescue. He looked down at the bar, and then scratched his head.

  “We don’t know each other.”

  “True.”

  “I can’t trust you.”

  “I work for a respected foreign intelligence agency.”

  “Who? What agency?”

  “And while sometimes the methods of my agency are unpleasant, we don’t stay in business by turning our backs on people who help us. If you help me, I will protect you. As I’ve protected you tonight by making certain I wasn’t followed here.”

  A minute passed.

  “I only know a little about the Nakhchivan project,” said the engineer.

  “I’ll take a little.”

  “What happens then?”

  “Then I destroy any evidence of collusion between us and I go away. Permanently.”

  “This isn’t fair.”

  “I know.”

  Another minute passed. Then, “It was an airstrip. We built an airstrip. ”

  “Civilian?”

  “I don’t think so. It was in a…a remote location.”

  “Where?”

  “Close to the border with Iran and Armenia, but not so close that it could be seen from the border.”

  “Do you have GPS coordinates?”

  “No.”

  “How do I get there?”

  “Go to Unus.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A town. There’s only one road going north out of Unus. You’ll eventually see a fence. It will be guarded. The entire zone is guarded.”