Death of a Spy Read online

  “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.”

  18

  Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

  Daria was on her way to the neighborhood supermarket that evening when her cell rang.

  “Hey,” said Mark. “How’s it going?”

  Because she was using one hand to hold her phone to her ear, it was a struggle for her to push the stroller straight over the bumpy sidewalk. “Fine. Well, not fine, really. She still has a diaper rash and she’s cranky.” After being up half the night before with Lila and with her all day, Daria was cranky too. “I walked around with her too much. Sorry.”

  It embarrassed her that, after being around small kids so much at the orphanages, she would have screwed up with her own. But most of the kids at the orphanages were older. And she wasn’t responsible for changing their diapers.

  “Don’t be sorry.”

  “Our neighbor downstairs said I should try egg whites. As in smear the egg whites all over her butt.”

  Egg whites! Sure, why not baste her baby’s bottom as if it were a pie shell? It sounded to Daria like a good way to give Lila salmonella poisoning. Before Lila had been born, she’d researched diaper creams and had come up with three that she thought were the best. None had been available in any of the pharmacies in Bishkek, so she’d had to settle for a Chinese-made brand that she worried might have radiator fluid in it.

  “Yeah, let’s not do that,” said Mark. “Listen, I’ve got some bad news and some really good news.”

  Daria checked the time. Mark was supposed to be in flight at the moment. “Where are you?”

  “That’s the bad news part. I agreed to do a job for Kaufman.” A three-second silence, then, “Mark—”

  “It might be related to what happened to Larry, otherwise I wouldn’t have said I’d do it. That airline sticker from Nakhchivan that you noticed, it’s had some ripple effects.”

  “You already accepted this job?”

  “I said I’d see what I could do over the next couple days.” Before she could object, he added, “I know, I know, the timing completely sucks.”

  Another silence, then, “You didn’t think to maybe call me first? I mean, dealing with Larry, that I understood. But…” Daria shook her head. She’d known calls like this would come. Just as she knew there’d be times when her work would get busy and she’d need Mark to cover the home front. They’d talked about all that. But she hadn’t thought it would start up so soon after Lila had been born. “What kind of job?”

  “An investigation of sorts.”

  “Why do they need you?”

  “I guess the guy they have on it now is running into some trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble? And if he’s running into trouble, why wouldn’t you?” Upon not receiving an answer, Daria said, “Mark, I don’t—”

  “Listen, the good news—make that the great news—is that the job is in Azerbaijan. I’ll be in Baku by tomorrow morning.” He neglected to mention that he’d be traveling to Baku, a mere three hundred miles southeast of Tbilisi, via Istanbul, which lay over eight hundred miles to the west. If the Russians really were after him, it would be better to stay moving, and to get out of Georgia sooner rather than later. And he’d feel safer sleeping on the plane than he would here at the airport, even in the secure zone. True, the Russians also had deep ties to Azerbaijan, but that was Mark’s turf as well; if anyone tried to follow him there, he’d lose them in no time.

  “OK, now I’m confused.”

  “Kaufman got our PNGs lifted, Daria. It was part of the deal I struck with him. We can go back to Azerbaijan. We can raise Lila in Baku.”

  The news was so unexpected that Daria didn’t know what to say. But she could hear the excitement in Mark’s voice, and he wasn’t an easily excitable guy. And she knew how much he loved Baku. She didn’t want to be a downer. Besides, they’d talked before about the possibility of moving back to Baku if their PNGs ever got lifted, and she’d agreed she could run her foundation from there, maybe expand into helping orphanages on that side of the Caspian.

  But those talks had always been theoretical, because Mark had never been able to make any headway with the Azeris on getting his PNG, much less hers, lifted. “I thought Kaufman hated me?”

  “I told him that I wouldn’t take the job unless we both could resettle in Baku.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  A year earlier, she might have greeted the news with more enthusiasm. She’d come to Bishkek not because she’d harbored any particular fondness for the city, or for Kyrgyzstan, but just because it happened to be close to some of the orphanages she’d arranged to help fund. She’d originally viewed the move as temporary, while she did penance for past misdeeds and figured out what to do with the rest of her life. But her penance had become her passion. She took immense satisfaction from interacting with the kids, and working with Nazira, and managing a foundation that was now funded by real donors instead of just money she’d wheedled out of the CIA.

  And at the same time, she’d come to like Bishkek. She liked the leafy parks, the nearby mountains, and summer trips to Lake Issyk-Kul. And she sensed that undertaking a major move—Baku was a thousand miles away—on top of running her foundation and raising Lila would be a recipe for stress and anxiety.

  “Baku has got so much more going for it than Bishkek. We’ll have better schools—”

  “And if Lila never says she wants to be president she might even be able to attend them.”

  Daria was referring to an incident she and Mark had discussed, where a young student in Azerbaijan had been asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and he’d made the mistake of saying he wanted to be president. The student had been told there was only one president, and that the position was taken; the student’s parents had been taken to task for having raised a child to would dare utter such an effrontery. As a result of the attention, the child had been pulled from the school.

  “She’ll be in a private school. We’ll have better health care—”

  “People in Azerbaijan go to Iran for health care.”

  “Used to go to Iran. It’s getting better in Baku. A lot better. All the oil money, you know? They’re building a brand new hospital downtown, and the private clinics, a co
uple of them are great.” Then, sounding a little less flip and a little more annoyed, “I thought we’d talked about this.”

  “Yeah, we did.” But that had been a year ago, thought Daria. When moving to Baku had been a theoretical possibility instead of a real one.

  “I thought you said it wouldn’t be a big deal, that you could run your foundation from there.”

  Daria had never been crazy about Baku. It was a big city—over two million people—and surrounded by desert. But Baku was definitely more cosmopolitan than Bishkek and there was a ton more money sloshing around there, which meant far more modern amenities. She had no interest in patronizing the Gucci and Tiffany stores in downtown Baku, but figured it was a pretty safe bet that the mothers who did weren’t basting their baby’s asses with egg whites. And there was no denying that the health care system in Kyrgyzstan was abysmal. Before Lila, she hadn’t given it a second thought. She knew the risks—millions of people around the world dealt with lousy health care systems, she and Mark could too—but what if Lila got sick? Was it fair to put her at risk?

  What if they stayed in Bishkek and Lila got really ill in the months or years to come? If she suddenly spiked a high fever, where would they take her? Almaty was two hours away, across an international border.

  She imagined trips to the local pediatrician’s office in downtown Baku. It would be a clean and orderly place. Instead of an old man who reeked of vodka—she thought of the anesthesiologist who’d inspired her to elect for a natural childbirth—it would be a woman in a white coat who smiled.

  “Think they have Triple Paste diaper cream in Baku?” she asked. “It’s got lanolin in it. I want it.”

  “I’ll check.”

  “Either that or Desitin, the maximum-strength formulation, not the rapid relief one.”

  “OK.”

  “Baku will be great.” She didn’t really think that now, but she was hoping she would later, after she’d caught up on some sleep and didn’t have to worry about things like Kegel exercises and diaper rashes. “The news took me by surprise, and we’ll have to talk about the logistics of the move, but we’ll make it work. In the meantime, be safe.”