The Colonel's Mistake Read online

  Mark staggered toward the closest boat, still carrying Daria, and collapsed in the back.

  EPILOGUE

  Baku, Two Weeks Later

  Mark glanced into his spare bedroom. Daria lay sleeping beneath yellow cotton sheets. On a table next to the bed, in a clear vase, stood a tall bouquet of white gladioli. It was eight in the morning. Rays of bright sunlight slipped through gaps in the window curtains.

  They’d arrived at his apartment the day before, after having spent the past week in hiding at a house north of Baku, guarded round the clock by Orkhan’s men. Western-educated doctors had tended to Daria’s recovery, including a plastic surgeon and orthopedist that Mark had arranged to have secretly flown in from Paris. Which, to his dismay, had taken care of the rest of his CIA money and then some.

  As she healed, Mark had focused on confirming his theory that Colonel Henry Amato had been Daria’s birth father.

  His first step had been to threaten to go public with what he knew about what Amato and Ellis had been up to. In exchange for keeping his mouth shut, the director of national intelligence had allowed him access to all of Colonel Amato’s records.

  Whereupon Mark learned that Amato had never even been CIA.

  He’d started his career as an infantry grunt in Vietnam, had switched over to Army Intelligence after the war, and in the late 1970s had been assigned to an intelligence unit in Tehran commanded by Jack Campbell. His mission had been to infiltrate a prominent Iranian family with ties to the National Front, a group opposed to Khomeini’s Islamic revolution. Evidently the way Amato had tried to infiltrate this family had been by developing a relationship with the twenty-five-year-old daughter of the family patriarch.

  The same file had revealed that many years later, while Amato had been working on a sensitive project for the Defense Department, he’d been questioned by internal investigators about large sums of money that had been transferred out of his personal account. He’d quickly been cleared, however, when he’d provided proof that the money had been used to pay for multiple, but ultimately unsuccessful, in vitro fertilization attempts for his wife.

  Mark’s cell phone rang. He walked out to his balcony before answering and sat down on the plastic lounge chair in front of his dead tomato plants.

  “Hey,” said Decker. “She good?”

  “Yeah. Still sleeping.”

  The CIA now knew about Daria’s relationship to the MEK. Records recovered at Neft Dashlari had incriminated her, as had files on Ellis’s computer. She wouldn’t be prosecuted—Mark still had enough leverage with the Agency to prevent that from happening—but she’d be recalled and fired as soon as she recovered.

  Mark wasn’t looking forward to telling her the news. Nor was he looking forward to telling her the truth about her father. He’d have to come clean about everything soon, though. Last night she’d started asking questions.

  “You?”

  “Never better,” said Mark, which wasn’t a complete lie.

  He was alive. Daria was alive. And Nika was safely back in Baku as of yesterday, although Mark doubted she’d ever want to see him again.

  As for the rest of it, there’d been no bungled attack on the USS Ronald Reagan, and no coup in Iran. Two days ago Mark had read that Aryanpur had suffered a massive heart attack and had died peacefully in his sleep.

  Which told him that the CIA had delivered evidence of Aryanpur’s treason to the right people in Iran.

  “By the way,” said Mark. “I got your general discharge upgraded to honorable.”

  “No shit!”

  “Funny how quick things can happen when you threaten to go public with intel the government wants to keep secret.”

  “Thanks, boss.”

  “No worries.”

  “Really, I mean it. That’s awesome.”

  “Will you go back to the States?”

  “No can do. I’ve got a job coming up next week. Actually, that’s why I’m calling. Thought you might be interested in teaming up again.”

  “I already got a job, Deck.”

  “This one’s in Uzbekistan.”

  “You got your discharge upgraded. What do you need another contractor job for? You can get a real job.”

  “We’d be working for CAIN, it’s a—”

  “Spies-for-hire outfit. I know the guy who runs it.”

  “I figured you did.”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  “Didn’t you used to work with him?”

  “Yeah, that’s how I know he’s an asshole.”

  “He’d just be subbing the work to us. The real job would be a security detail for some dudes from Oklahoma with cash to burn. They’re checking out a couple spots for oil platforms in the Aral Sea. One week, in and out.”

  Mark had been surprised at first at how well Decker had handled the aftermath of the assault on Neft Dashlari. The act of killing five men hadn’t seemed to bother him—Decker had said he’d followed his own rules of engagement, and that was what was important. He was fired at and he fired back. End of story.

  Mark, by contrast, had been having nightmares. He’d been fine when moving at light speed, just trying to survive. But when he stopped to think, everything came at him. He kept telling himself that it was pointless to dwell too much on it, but he did anyway.

  “No thanks.”

  “It’ll be a cake walk, and good cash.”

  “Classes at the university start in three weeks. And I told Orkhan I’d start helping his kid with the SAT.” And on top of that he was going to make himself finish his book on Soviet influence in Azerbaijan…It was time to get on with the business of building a life outside of the CIA or he’d just slip back into his old ways.

  “I’ll go fifty-fifty with you. We don’t have to be there for two weeks.”

  For a fleeting second Mark considered it. He was close to broke, teaching paid squat, and nightmares or not Uzbekistan probably would be a cake walk because the place was dirt poor and unbelievably corrupt—even more corrupt than Azerbaijan, which was saying something. A few dollars placed in the right hands could buy a lot of information in Uzbekistan.

  He saw himself getting plastered on rounds of vodka shots in a seedy bar in Tashkent, making bad toasts to the health of some Soviet-era bureaucrat he’d bribe by the end of the night. In and out in a week could work, he thought. For ten, no, fifteen grand—he wouldn’t take a dime less. He’d spent over twenty years slumming around grimy underworlds, and yes, there was a meanness to them that was corrupting to him and everyone else who set foot inside, but what was one more week?

  Then he pictured Daria. Her right arm had been snapped in two. Her jaw was still wired shut. The cuts on her face were still raw. That woman had been beat to hell inside and out.

  “I’ve got other plans,” he said.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to the people in Azerbaijan and Iran who treated me with such hospitality and kindness; to Richard Curtis, my outstanding agent; to Christina Henry de Tessan for her skill as an editor; to Andy Bartlett at Amazon for reading my book the way I was hoping it would be read; to my wife, Corinne, and my children, Kirsten and William, for all the love and good times; and to my friends and extended family for their unfailing encouragement.

  I would also like to thank the many reporters, scholars, and ex-CIA officers who, through their books, lent insight to this novel. An annotated bibliography can be found at DanMayland.com.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo by Corinne Mayland, 2010

  Dan Mayland spent years exploring the outer limits of Western civilization and beyond. He has slept on the streets of Europe, summited mountains in Colombia and Bolivia, trekked through Bhutan and Nepal, visited remote Buddhist monasteries in India, and explored Shiite mosques in Iran and Azerbaijan. An international news and foreign policy junkie, Mayland is an avid reader of Stratfor.com, AlJazeera.com, ForeignPolicy.com, Ettelaat.com, and Rferl.com, and he has written articles for Iranian.com. Mayland’s first book
, The Colonel’s Mistake, is the inaugural novel of the Mark Sava series.