by Dan Mayland
After washing what little hair Lila had, she moved on to her daughter’s feet, then hands.
She wondered whether her own mother—her birth mother, that is, the one who’d been murdered in Iran when Daria was just a baby—had ever washed her like this, ever loved her like this?
But of course she had, Daria told herself. She’d been feeling close to her mother of late, closer than she’d ever felt before. She thought now of what it would be like to be separated from Lila by death, the way she and her mother had been separated, and a wave of emotion swept through her—longing for Lila, sympathy for her mother, sadness for what might have been…
Lila made another cooing sound.
“Mommy’s thinking crazy thoughts, isn’t she?” She tickled Lila’s tummy. “Tell Mommy not to worry so much.”
She was bound to worry, though, especially with Mark gone. It had been two and a half days since they’d last talked. She had no idea where he was. She wondered whether it was going to be like this for the rest of their lives—with Mark always taking off and her sitting at home, anxious, tending to Lila.
That would suck.
Their agreement—partially spoken, partially unspoken—was that they would share responsibility for Lila, each pitching in as needed. It wasn’t that Daria minded taking care of Lila now, far from it, the joy she felt was sometimes intense, but in the back of her mind she wondered whether Mark thought…
“You’re worrying again,” she said out loud. “Stop worrying.” Then, “OK, let’s finish up this bath.”
When Lila was all clean, Daria lifted her onto a white baby towel that she’d spread out on a terrycloth bathmat.
“OK, let’s get you dry.”
Daria’s phone, which she’d left on the kitchen table, chirped once. She finished drying Lila and swaddled her in the towel. On the way to the changing table, she passed by the kitchen and glanced at her phone.
The text message was from a number she didn’t recognize. She tapped the screen. At first glance, she thought the actual message was blank, but then she realized that there was a single x in the upper left-hand corner.
“Oh, no,” she said. “No, Mark, no…”
43
Baku, Azerbaijan
Orkhan sat in the rear seat of his armored black Suburban. Accompanying him were two bodyguards, both second cousins by marriage; his driver, who was one of his many nephews; and his personal assistant. They had just pulled out of Orkhan’s driveway and were now speeding down from the hills above Baku.
“Sir, where to now?” asked the driver.
Orkhan considered. His spies in the Interior Ministry were already investigating what the interior minister was up to. But if he allowed himself to be caught before his men got to the bottom of this—if it became widely known that he’d been imprisoned and had fallen out of favor with the president—then all but his most loyal men would abandon him.
No one would abandon him, however, until the warrant was served.
“First to Nardaran. We’ll pay a surprise visit to the ayatollah, to see whether he knows anything about this bombing in Tehran.” Nardaran, which lay twenty miles northeast of Baku, was the most religiously conservative town in Azerbaijan. Orkhan, though not a particularly observant Muslim himself, maintained good relations with the local ayatollah by making sure the donation boxes at the mosque were full; in return the ayatollah informed on Muslim extremists.
Orkhan’s cell rang. He checked the ID; it wasn’t a number he recognized, so he handed the phone to his assistant. “Answer it on speaker, find out what they want. If it’s for me, tell them we’re already in Nardaran and that I’m in a meeting.”
Orkhan’s assistant, a burly man with a fat neck and a short beard, answered the phone.
“Orkhan?” said the caller.
“Who is this?”
“Where is Minister Gambar?” The voice was a whisper.
“Nardaran. Speak louder.”
“I need to talk to him. Now.”
“He is in a meeting.”
“Interrupt him. Tell him it’s Mark Sava.”
“Sava?” Orkhan asked.
“Orkhan, pick up. I’ve only got seconds, I’m about to be taken.”
Orkhan grabbed his phone back and took it off speaker. “Talk to me, Sava.”
“I have information for you, but first I need your help.”
“What information?”
“About your operation in Nakhchivan.”
Two beats, then, “What do you know of this? And why didn’t you tell me what you knew two days ago in Baku?”
“No time now, Orkhan. I have seconds. Send help.”
“What is your location?”
“Nakhchivan City, near the Momine Khatun mausoleum. Can your men track me from my phone?”
“Yes, but—”
“I’ll leave it on as long as I can. I’m in a tight spot.”
“Mark, what—”
“They’re here.”
“Mark?” Orkhan took the phone away from his ear and stared at it for a moment. He put it back to his ear. “Mark?”
The connection had been severed.
44
Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan
Mark stuffed the prepaid he’d used to call Orkhan into his underpants. He pulled the second prepaid from his pocket just as someone grabbed his ankles and yanked him out from under the tree he’d been using for cover.
Two more men ran up. Mark noted that both carried MP-443 Grach pistols—a graceless but effective weapon favored by the Russian military. They kicked Mark repeatedly in the stomach and chest—he felt at least two ribs break—until he almost blacked out.
The word motherfuckers kept looping through his brain.
In Russian, “Drop the phone.”
In English, Mark said, “I don’t understand you!”
The response came in Russian-accented English. “Phone, you shit. Drop!”
Mark let the prepaid in his hand fall to the ground just as the Tabriz Hotel guy showed up.
While patting him down, they found and removed his wallet, iPad, permanent phone, and keys, but missed the prepaid he’d used to call Orkhan. Someone yanked him up. Mark just hung like dead weight.
“Walk!” one of them commanded.
Mark refused to do so—instead he pressed his legs close together, which helped him keep the prepaid lodged in his nether regions from falling out.
All four men pushed and dragged him back down the hill to a black Kia sedan that was idling on the side of the road. They heaved him into the back of the car, stuffed a canvas sack over his head, and pushed him onto the floor.
“Head down!”
Mark was in the process of complying when someone kicked his head to the floor. He felt a pistol on the back of his neck. A man climbed into the rear seat.
“You raise head, I shoot. You fight, I shoot. Understand?”
“Up yours.”
Another kick. “Eyes to ground. No question.”
They drove for maybe a half hour, during which time a boot was always jammed against the back of Mark’s head. The left side of his chest, where he’d broken a couple of ribs, hurt where it was pressed up against the floor of the car.
Even with the sack over his head he could detect the sun streaming in from the rear right-hand side of the car. It was late morning, so he calculated the sun would be shining from the southeast, which meant the rear right-hand side of the car was facing southeast, which in turn meant the front of the car had to be facing north.
They traveled over land that was flat, or nearly so, for most of the trip—until the end, that is, when they drove up a steep, winding slope for a few minutes before coming to a stop.
“Get out.”
Mark just lay there.
“I say get out!” A kick, then, in Russian, “Grab him.”
Mark clenched his arms to his chest and crossed his legs, preferring to endure more immediate pain than get out of the car of his own accord and risk dislodging
the prepaid. When they tried to grab him, he let his body relax so that he was dead weight again. Three guys muscled him out of the back, then dragged him across what felt like a long stretch of pavement. He listened for other cars, or people, but heard none.
He was stuffed through what he guessed was a revolving door and into a carpeted and air-conditioned space.
“Where do they want him?”
“Downstairs. Guard him until General Titov gets here.”
“He knows we made the capture?
“Yes, yes, as soon as you reported from the city we told him. He will arrive later today.”
They were speaking in Russian, as though Mark wasn’t there.
“He wasn’t due until tomorrow.”
“Yes, I don’t understand it.”
“Is the prisoner hurt?”
“Not very.”
“Why won’t he stand?”
“Because he’s a cocksucker.”
They lugged Mark down several hallways, down a flight of stairs, then into an elevator. They descended. When the elevator opened, Mark smelled something metallic, or…he couldn’t quite place it. The air seemed particularly dry and cool, though. Through the canvas sack, he perceived a dim light.
Footsteps of men walking on gravel echoed off the walls. They dumped him on what felt like a bed with a saggy mattress. Springs squeaked beneath him as the bed settled. Mark rearranged himself so as to remove pressure from his broken ribs.
“OK, cocksucker, welcome to your new home.”
Someone laughed, then said, “I need a drink.”
“The bootlicker forbids it.”
A top being unscrewed from a bottle. “Screw Titov.”
45
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan
Daria called John Decker.
“Mark’s been taken!” Cradling her phone between her shoulder and her ear, she was stuffing supplies—diapers, baby wipes, a digital thermometer, breast pads, a pacifier, a changing pad, and the crummy Chinese-made diaper cream—into Lila’s diaper bag.
“What happened?”
“I got the emergency text.” Daria crammed in another diaper and then struggled to zip the bag up. Lila had woken up and was crying in her bassinet.
“What text?”
“We’d agreed on a system. If he was ever in a situation where he thought he was about to be captured, he’d let me know, if he could. So that I’d know what happened to him, but also so that…” Daria didn’t want to say the words aloud. “Anyway, I’m packing now.”
“So that whoever had taken him couldn’t use you and Lila against him.”
“Yeah.” Threatening to harm, or actually harming, a prisoner’s family was a common way of conducting an interrogation. So she and Mark had taken some basic precautions. “We agreed on certain signals. I just got the worst one. Can you track a cell phone?”
“Here, yeah, we’ve got some connections, but not in Azerbaijan. The NSA could.”
“Deck, I don’t know…”
Lila was crying louder now.
“Where’d you last have a location on him?”
“Baku.”
“He went to Ganja after that, I wired him some money. If I push hard enough I should be able to get through to Kaufman. If he’s not a dick, he’ll leverage Agency resources to figure out where Mark called from. Forward me the text Mark sent you.”
“OK. Make Kaufman do this, Deck. He owes Mark.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t try, do it! If Kaufman screws Mark over on this, I swear I’ll come after him myself. You can tell him that too.”
“You know, you could always go to the embassy for the time being. No one could get to you there.”
Daria was in her and Mark’s bedroom, slipping her alias documents into her purse next to the snub-nosed Glock that was already in there.
“Just find out where Mark is, I’ll handle the rest.”
46
Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan
Mark heard footsteps on gravel, then, “Welcome, General Titov.”
For the past several hours Mark had been thinking of Daria, hoping that she’d gotten his message, and that she and Lila were someplace safe. He’d also been wondering whether he was too far underground for his prepaid to transmit a signal.
Now he had the sense that someone was staring at him. No one spoke for a good minute.
Then, “Uncover his head.”
The canvas sack was yanked off. Mark blinked as his eyes adjusted. He was in what appeared to be a mine. But it wasn’t a dirty mine, where coal or iron ore was being extracted. Instead the ceiling and walls appeared to be made of grayish, translucent crystal.
“It’s salt,” said a man in Russian-accented English. He stood behind Mark. “It keeps the air clean, and dry. People who have lung trouble come here to breathe. We’re on the women’s side. It’s nicer.”
Which explains all the beds, thought Mark. There were maybe a hundred of them, lined up in two perfectly straight rows down the length of a long cavern. The beds were all metal framed. Polyester blankets imprinted with a floral pattern were spread over each one. A string of dim, bare-bulb lights ran down the apex of the cavern’s low arched ceiling.
“Turn around.”
That voice—Mark had a sense that he’d heard it before, but he struggled to place where. He turned.
A man sat, or rather slouched, on a bed about six feet away. He was of average size, but muscular in a flinty, weathered way. His eyes were blue, cheekbones high, lips thin, forehead prominent, gray hair crew-cut short. He wore gray slacks, shiny black wingtip shoes, and a too-tight short-sleeved collared dress shirt that accentuated his muscular torso and arms. In his right hand was a big black semiautomatic Grach pistol; he held it lazily, resting it on his right thigh in a way that said he wasn’t the slightest bit afraid of anything Mark might do.
“Why do they call you bootlicker?” Mark asked in English.
“What?”
“Your men. Why do they call you this? Whose boots do you lick?”
Turning to the guards behind him, Titov snarled in Russian, “You idiots! You talk in front of him? He understands Russian.”
“He lies, sir,” said one of the guards. “No one said—”
“Leave us!”
Mark studied his captor. Switching to Russian, he said, “Have we met before?”
Instead of answering, Titov took a manila folder that lay beside him on the bed and tossed it to Mark. “Open it.”
The folder hit Mark’s shin and fell to the ground. Mark leaned forward to pick it up, forcing himself not to wince as a bolt of pain from his broken ribs shot up his side.
Titov shifted his gun arm slightly, so that the barrel was aimed at Mark’s head. “You haven’t changed much, considering the years,” he observed. “Not so much, at least, that I wasn’t able to recognize you when I reviewed the tape.”
Mark pulled a large glossy color photograph out of the envelope. It was grainy—a single frame grabbed from what he guessed was a video—but he had no problem recognizing himself. He was at the Dachi hotel in Tbilisi, in the room where Larry Bowlan had been found dead. And he was looking at Katerina’s self-portrait.
He studied the photo, then Titov. “Recognized me from what? From when?”
“Katerina, you can’t really see her face, but her hair, her figure, she looks beautiful there, no?”
Ordinarily, Mark tried to control an interrogation—even if he was the one being interrogated—by trying to assess what the interrogator wanted to hear and tailoring his answers accordingly. But in this case, he hadn’t a clue as to what Titov was after. Or why he was after it. Which meant he was in danger of giving a wrong answer.
He observed the tension in Titov’s jaw, saw that the pistol that rested on his thigh was now gripped a little tighter.
“Answer my question,” said Titov.
“I don’t like the tone of your question. Did you kill my friend?”
“Friend? What friend?”
“Larry Bowlan.”
“That pig? Yes, of course I killed him. He was foolish to have come back to Georgia. I gave him an injection of sux—you know this drug?”
Mark did. Succinylcholine—sux for short—was a muscle relaxant that induced complete paralysis, including in muscles needed to breathe. In hospitals, it was given to patients just prior to inserting a breathing tube attached to a mechanical ventilator; outside of hospitals, it was used to kill people, mainly because it was hard to detect in toxicology tests. Mark recalled that the Mossad had been caught using sux to assassinate a Hamas operative in Dubai a few years earlier.
Titov added, “I watched him suffocate to death while looking at Katerina’s painting. His brain was working just fine, but he couldn’t breathe. He looked like a fish out of water.” Titov made a fish mouth with his lips. “Urinating all over himself. I enjoyed this very much.”
Mark eyed Titov. “What does Katerina have to do with this? Where is she?”
“I took a risk killing—” Titov stopped in midsentence. For the first time, he looked genuinely surprised. “What did you ask me?”
“What the hell does Katerina have to do with this?”
Speaking slowly, as if incredulous that Mark had dared to pose such questions, Titov said, “Where is she?” Titov stood. Gesticulating with his Grach pistol, he said, “You mean to tell me you don’t…” He shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”
“I knew a woman named Katerina Kustinskaya twenty-four years ago, when I was a student in Georgia. I haven’t seen or heard from her since.”
Titov leaped forward and swung his pistol down hard. Mark blocked the blow with his forearm and dove into Titov, who clobbered him on the back of his head with the pistol and sent a knee up into Mark’s face. Mark stumbled, then felt the barrel of the pistol on the back of his head.
You sonofabitch, thought Mark. I’m going to pay you back for that.
“Don’t you dare move,” said Titov, as he maneuvered himself behind Mark while keeping the pistol barrel tight on Mark’s skull. Then, in a manic voice just short of a shout, he said, “This is the end of your time on this earth. No God will save you. Your pleas for mercy will go unanswered. After you die, and your blood stains the earth, you will be buried in a trash heap. No one will mourn you, no one will care.”