Death of a Spy Read online

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Just remember, you’re a father now.”

  “I’ll call or e-mail when I can. But from here on out, figure I’m on field rules. Maybe I should have started them earlier, but this whole thing’s just kind of snowballed.”

  When Mark was on a job, he typically communicated with her only when absolutely necessary. He did it for the same reason that they’d both used complex anonymous corporate structures to register their respective professional enterprises, why Daria never allowed herself to be photographed with prospective donors to her foundation, why the last name on Lila’s birth certificate was Stephenson, and why she and Mark had alias documents in that name as well and had used that name when purchasing their apartment in Bishkek. It was all to create as secure a firewall as possible between their personal lives, and their lives—both past and present—in the intelligence underworld.

  When it came to communications, even when they both took precautions, they could never be certain those communications weren’t being traced. So when Mark was on a job, radio silence with home was the rule.

  “I know the drill,” said Daria.

  19

  Baku, Azerbaijan

  The next day

  Baku was booming.

  The main airport terminal, which Mark blazed through on his way to the line of cabs out front, was completely new, all flashy curves and gleaming steel and glass—it was three times the size of the old one he’d passed through when he’d been kicked out of the country. The road from the airport, instead of the chaotic potholed mess that it had been just a few years ago, was now an eight-lane, newly paved modern highway that his cab driver navigated at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour—because he’d been promised a two hundred dollar tip if Mark arrived at the embassy in time for an important meeting. As Mark watched for cars that might be following him—he doubted many could keep up—he observed that the highway was lined with thousands of decorative street lamps, each one of which he guessed cost more than the average Azeri made in a year.

  The boom, fueled by massive amounts of oil money, had already been well under way when Mark had gotten the boot, but it still surprised him to see—good Lord, there was even a Trump Tower—how much had changed in the time he’d been gone.

  One thing that hadn’t, however, was the US embassy on Azadliq Prospect. Constructed during Baku’s first oil boom over a century earlier, before the Soviets had driven the Azeri oil industry into the ground, the building itself was grand—much nicer than the nuclear-bunker fortress-embassy that the US had built in Bishkek—but it was set behind high walls, and the utilitarian green-metal entrance door that one needed to pass through to get to it was reminiscent of an underfunded prison.

  As Mark jogged up to the entrance, he thought, and not for the first time, would it kill the State Department to slap a fresh coat of paint on the entrance door, and paste up a sign that said something cheerful? WELCOME TO THE EMBASSY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! WE’RE GLAD YOU CAME TO VISIT! Because for a lot of people, that grungy door was all they’d ever see of the United States.

  At a little guard shack, Mark encountered security checkpoints manned by armed Azeris in blue uniforms. He noted the electric wiring in the little shack was still a mess—the circuit panel still lacked a cover—and the metal detector was the same ancient model that had been there for as long as he could remember.

  He handed over his new passport, the one that the US embassy in Tbilisi had brought him, courtesy of Kaufman, just before he’d boarded his flight for Istanbul; it was brown, marking him as a US citizen engaged in official US business.

  “Cell phone?” asked the guard, pointing to Mark’s shoulder bag. “Laptop?”

  “I’m keeping them. Call for approval.”

  Civilians were required to turn over all electronics, but not people who worked at the embassy.

  “You have an appointment?”

  “With Roger Davis.”

  Officially, Davis was the embassy’s political counselor; unofficially, he was the CIA’s chief of station/Azerbaijan.

  Permission to bring electronics into the embassy was denied, so Mark handed over Larry’s laptop and camera, along with his own phone, iPad, two charging cords, and an adapter for the iPad that allowed him to connect it to other devices;; in return, the guard gave him a laminated ticket with the number three on it.

  A student intern met him at the marine guard checkpoint inside the main embassy building, but instead of bringing him to Davis, she ushered him to the pleasantly cluttered office of the public affairs officer and told him to wait.

  He didn’t mind the first half hour. Baku was nine hours ahead of Washington, DC. Which meant that when people first arrived at the embassy in the morning, they’d have a mini-mountain of cables to sort through—everything that Washington would have sent during the course of the previous day back in the States. Because Mark had shown up at the embassy at 9:30 a.m., Davis might have been legitimately busy.

  After an hour, the public affairs officer—a nervous woman who alternated between chewing her nails while staring at her computer and typing furiously on her keyboard—looked up as though seeing Mark for the first time, apologized for the delay, and asked whether he’d like some tea and cookies. Mark politely declined, but did ask for a phone so that he could call the US embassy in Georgia.

  He managed to reach Keal, who’d had no luck finding Katerina. Mark suggested that the Georgian Bureau of Vital Records, or the state pension system that Georgians contributed to, might be able to help, especially if the request came directly from the US embassy. With a name, a birth month and year—July 1968—they should be able to find something. Keal reluctantly agreed to place a few more calls.

  After an hour and a half, Mark announced that he needed to visit the restroom—he knew the way, no need to show him—and instead walked unmolested past the public affairs division, where a young foreign service officer was monitoring the Facebook and Twitter feeds of Azeri activists, and into his old office on the third floor.

  Roger Davis was reclining in his executive chair, feet up on a six-foot-long oak desk that Mark had bought for the equivalent of twenty dollars when the Azeris had been clearing out a bunch of Soviet junk from Baku’s old city hall. Davis was reading Zaman, Turkey’s largest newspaper, and drinking from a liter bottle of Diet Coke.

  “Am I disturbing you?” Mark glanced around the office. It was pretty much the same as when he’d left it. A fraying blue rug, a tall window that looked out onto the little courtyard where he’d liked to eat lunch when the weather allowed, a coffee table, and two wingback chairs. No real decorations, save for a bust of George Washington that sat on the coffee table, a contribution from the station’s first chief back in the nineties, when the embassy had been housed in a hotel. Mark did notice the old filing cabinets were gone; in their place was an array of printers, computers, and a row of external hard drives. A laptop sat on Davis’s desk.

  Davis eyed Mark. “Who let you up here?”

  Mark looked around, then shook his head. “Boy, I don’t miss this place.”

  He was telling the truth. He missed Baku, but he didn’t miss his old job as station chief. He hadn’t been cut out to work behind a desk, to be badgered constantly by bureaucrats at Langley who were more worried about not making mistakes than producing good intelligence.

  “I just got back from a team meeting. I have to finish with my notes. So if you could wait just a little longer.”

  Mark had never met Davis before. But there weren’t many CIA officers out there who lasted long enough to get promoted to station chief. Cordiality among those who had was typically the rule.

  “OK.” Mark plopped down in one of the wingback chairs.

  “The ambassador wants to be here too. That’s also part of the holdup. I’ll let you know when she’s ready.”

  “I’ll wait here.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Heard they’re buildi
ng a new hospital downtown. Pretty soon Baku isn’t even going to qualify as a hardship post. It’ll be like Paris.”

  Davis snorted. “Yes, the Paris of the Caspian. State already downgraded the hardship differential, but they screw with it any more and people are going to be tripping over each other to get the hell out of here. Which might not be a bad thing. People stay in one place too long, they get stuck in a rut. Start losing perspective.”

  Davis had only been running the station for two months, whereas Mark had run it for five years.

  “I’m not here to screw you over, Roger. I’m here because Kaufman asked for my help and I agreed to give it. While I’m here, I’ll do my best not to mess with your operation.”

  Given the circumstances, he thought it best not to mention that he intended to set up his spies-for-hire shop, indefinitely, right in downtown Baku.

  Davis put in a brief call to the ambassador. A tall woman—taller than either Mark or Davis by several inches, with wide nostrils and a masculine jawline—showed up about ten minutes later.

  The good news, thought Mark, was that she hadn’t just bought her post with a massive political contribution. She’d worked for the State Department for the past thirty years, spoke Russian, Turkish, French, and a bit of Azeri, and knew her policy well. The bad news was that she’d worked for the State Department for the past thirty years. Mark knew her by reputation, but she’d spent most of her career in Turkey and Washington, DC, so they’d never met.

  “I understand that Roger here,” the ambassador gestured to Davis, “has people he can send to Ganja. I’m really a bit confused as to why we need you at all.”

  Mark knew perfectly well why he was in Baku, and he suspected Roger Davis and the ambassador did too—because Kaufman didn’t have faith in Davis and his team. What he said, though, was, “I’m here because Ted Kaufman asked me to be here. He wants me to debrief and deliver an alias packet to your branch chief in Ganja—I understand the guy’s a little anxious?”

  “It’s nothing we can’t handle here on our own.”

  “After that, I’m supposed to investigate—”

  “I read the cable,” said Davis.

  “My obligations go beyond Ted Kaufman’s and the CIA’s,” said the ambassador. “The media isn’t going to set up camp outside Kaufman’s home if you cause an international incident.”

  The ambassador was the direct representative of the president. Part of her job was to make sure no intelligence operation came back to bite the current administration in the rear, or conflicted with the larger goals of the State Department.

  “You’d be investigating a possible murder on foreign soil,” she added. “Without the consent of the local authorities. That makes me very uncomfortable.”

  “Things have changed since you left,” said Davis to Mark. “A lot. The amount of money pouring into this place…” He exhaled loudly, as though at a loss for words. “I mean, every other day we get some wacko-bird from Congress passing through, trying to wheedle some shady deal for their home district, thinking they can just show up and we’ll act as their broker! Put them in touch with the right people! And that’s if we’re lucky. It’s the ones that try to convince me the northern half of Iran might secede and join Azerbaijan that are really nuts. I mean, you can’t believe the level of ignorance.”

  “Oh, I can believe it,” said Mark.

  “Point being, the stakes are higher here now. Most people might not have a clue, but they still care what happens here, or think they do. There’s a lot of money on the line.”

  Sensing Davis was just voicing general concerns because he didn’t want to run afoul of Kaufman by voicing specific ones, Mark said, “Fine. Point taken. But what does that have to do with what Kaufman has asked me to do in Ganja?”

  The ambassador said, “I took the liberty of calling our embassy in Bishkek. People there speak highly of you and the work your firm has done in Central Asia. But the difference here is, well…” The ambassador shook her head in disapproval as her voice trailed off.

  “The difference is, I’m being thrust upon you by Washington,” said Mark, finishing the thought. “To do a job you don’t want done.”

  “Something like that,” said the ambassador.

  “Listen, I’m sympathetic to your concerns, but it sounds as if you have a problem with Langley, not me.”

  “That may be so, but you’re the one sitting here in front of me.”

  “So then veto the investigation. Kaufman will raise a stink and probably drag his boss and your boss into it, but you do what you gotta do.”

  “You get paid either way,” said Davis. “Is that it?”

  “Actually, no. I’d bill for the airfare, but not for the job. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not a dickhead. My firm delivers good intel at a fair price.”

  Mark didn’t fault Davis for feeling sour about the money; when Mark had run the station, he’d resented the private contractors too. The truth was, even charging the CIA a rate that was more than reasonable when compared to other private contractors, Mark was still making far more than Davis—and a ton more than the operations officers that Davis managed. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, but that was life. The solution was to fix the CIA so that they could do in-house what they now needed the private contractors to do, but Mark had little faith that would happen any time soon.

  Mark turned to the ambassador. “I won’t try to work in Azerbaijan without your approval. But if you don’t grant approval, we both know it’s going to piss off Kaufman. It’s your call.”

  The ambassador paused, then looked at Davis, who shrugged. “I want him sneaking around my station like I want a hole in my head, but my boss wants him here, so that’s game-set-match on my end. I’d like daily reports routed directly to me—”

  “I’m not guaranteeing daily. It’ll depend on where I am and what I’m doing. I’ll file timely reports.”

  Davis rolled his eyes. “Timely reports then. And a restriction on firearms.”

  The ambassador nodded slowly, considering the matter. “Agreed. No firearms in the station. That’s pretty much the rule here anyway.”

  That had been Mark’s official rule too for the last two years that he’d run the station. Azerbaijan had pretty restrictive gun laws; you had to weigh the risk of getting caught with an illegal gun against the potential security a gun could provide. Usually it wasn’t worth the risk, but most officers, especially the ones operating under nonofficial cover, kept a backup hidden somewhere, just in case.

  “I’m good with that,” said Mark. “Do you have the alias packet for your branch chief ready?”

  “I’ll need a few hours on that,” said Davis.

  They discussed logistics for a while longer, then Mark shook hands with Davis and the ambassador and thanked them for their time. He was about to leave when he remembered his promise to Daria. “By the way, you wouldn’t know where the best place to pick up decent diaper cream is, would you? It can’t just be any old brand, I need Triple Paste or Desitin.”

  The ambassador wrinkled her nose. “No, I would not.”

  “Try the new Port Baku mall,” said Davis. “I don’t know if they have a pharmacy, but if they do it’s a safe bet it’s stocked with a lot of high-end crap.”

  Mark collected his electronic equipment and, from the relative safety of the guardhouse, called two cabs. When they arrived, he turned to the armed Azeri guard who appeared to be in charge. “I’ll take an escort to my car, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “You are worried, sir?”

  “No, but I’m not exactly the most popular guy around here, so…”

  “It will not be a problem. But sir, you’re forgetting your computer and camera.”

  Mark had left Larry’s camera and laptop on the counter where the guard had placed them. The memory cards filled with photos of the Russian base were in a Ziploc bag on top of the laptop.

  “I’ll come for them in a few days.”
He didn’t need them and was sick of carrying them around. That, and he didn’t want to be caught snooping around Ganja while carrying photos of the Russian military base. Especially when the photos had already been backed up online.

  “I’m sorry, sir. We cannot store them for you. It is only storage for while you are in the embassy.”

  Mark left everything where it lay.

  “Please be careful with the camera, it’s expensive. Maybe store everything in a safe inside the embassy. Better yet, talk to Roger Davis. Have him store it all for me.”

  “Sir, I must tell you—”

  “Figure no longer than a week, tops. If it’s going to be longer than that I’ll send someone else to collect them.”

  “This is not like a locker room, where you can just—”

  “Talk to Davis. I’ve got to go, please escort me out.”

  The guard did so, albeit reluctantly.

  20

  Mark hadn’t been able to detect anyone following him from the airport to the embassy, but after what had happened in Tbilisi, he wasn’t about to take any chances.

  Upon exiting the guardhouse, he quickly assessed the two cabs that had pulled up in front: the first was one of the new London-style cabs that the president of Azerbaijan had insisted all be painted bright purple; the other a decrepit Russian-made Lada sedan. The man behind the wheel of the purple cab was considerably younger; judging that the younger driver in the newer car would be the faster ride, Mark climbed in. As he did so, a man across the street, wearing ridiculous mirrored aviator glasses and a brown leather jacket, appeared to glance at him.

  “The Four Seasons Hotel,” said Mark. “Get me there in five minutes, and I won’t need change for this hundred.” He slipped the bill into the cabbie’s hand and they took off like a shot.