The Colonel's Mistake

by Dan Mayland

  “On foot, already walking north on Pushkin.”

  “Why didn’t you call earlier?” He grabbed his bag, opened it to see if Daria had stolen any of his cash—she hadn’t—and limped toward the door, still stiff from having jumped off the balcony. Taped to the door at eye level was a note:

  Please drive straight to the embassy and stay there. I’m sorry I put you in danger. DO NOT try to find me.

  Daria

  “I did,” said Decker. “You didn’t answer.”

  “Don’t lose a visual.”

  Through the lobby windows, Mark saw the gray Lada sedan that Decker had rented parked in the circular driveway in front of the Absheron. The keys would be in the ignition. When he was about twenty feet from the lobby doors, he stopped. “How we looking?”

  “Still good.”

  But Mark stayed where he was.

  A moment later Decker said, “Hold up! She’s turning, heading right back to you.” And then, “Shit, she’s staring right at the entrance to the Absheron. I think she’s onto you, boss.”

  “No, she’s just being careful, doubling back to trip up any tail that might be on her.”

  He sat down on a couch that faced away from the windows and waited.

  A couple of minutes later Decker said, “OK, she’s moving again.”

  Mark walked through the lobby doors and got into the Lada. Inside was a faded navy-blue beret, a dirty brown blazer a size too big for him, a baseball cap, and a black windbreaker.

  He started the engine. “Fall back. I got her.”

  Mark drove past Daria, turned right a couple of blocks later, and then parked the car. That early in the morning, the streets of Baku were empty and dark. He followed her on foot. Taking parallel streets, he was able to monitor her from a distance at the intersections, using walls and bus shelters as blinds. He changed his appearance frequently, rotating the brown blazer, blue beret, baseball cap, and windbreaker in different combinations.

  She took surveillance-detection action on a couple occasions, slowing down and then speeding up, stopping and pretending to search for something in her shoulder bag as soon as she’d turned a corner. At one point she took a circuitous route through the massive railway station, circling back on her tracks a couple times.

  But while Daria was a natural when it came to recruiting and manipulating foreign agents, Mark noted she was still a bit of a rookie in the countersurveillance department. To him, her movements were often obvious and easy to anticipate—good enough to flush out a tail of even above average skill, perhaps, but not someone with his kind of experience.

  She walked the streets for over two hours. As she did, the city slowly came to life. Men pulled back metal grates covering their storefront windows and soon the smell of baking bread began to mix with the stink of diesel fumes.

  Finally she ducked into an alley, pulled a headscarf and a black chador robe from her bag, and came out dressed as a conservative Muslim woman. She walked straight down Azadlyq Avenue until she came to the Central Bank of Azerbaijan, an angular modern building clad in brilliant copper-colored reflective glass. In front of the bank lay an open square with a long central wading pool awash in the delicate sunlight of dawn.

  Using his binoculars, Mark observed Daria from a distance as she sat down on a bench by the pool. Then he called Decker and asked him to retrieve the Lada.

  When Decker showed up, Mark got into the driver’s seat and parked the car a couple of hundred yards behind Daria. The morning commuters were beginning to come out, providing some cover.

  “She’ll wait until seven when that bank, the Credit Azerbaycan, will let her in for off-hours access.” Mark pointed to a small brick building on the perimeter of the square, barely visible because it was tucked behind the much larger Central Bank.

  “How would you know?”

  When Mark didn’t answer, Decker said, “She a CIA agent?”

  Mark hesitated, then said, “Operations officer.” Noting the blank look on Decker’s face, he said, “Operations officers get hired by the CIA in Washington and are then sent abroad to spy. Agents are the foreigners they recruit to spy for them. The other thing you should know is that she’s been operating in Baku under nonofficial cover. Which means she has no diplomatic immunity, no special protection, nothing. The embassy can’t even officially acknowledge her. Needless to say, you are not to repeat—”

  “I can keep my mouth shut.”

  “I know she kept a safe deposit box with her original US passport here at the Azerbaycan. The CIA has a relationship with the bank that allows her and other ops officers access outside of normal hours.”

  “You know a lot about her.”

  “I used to be her boss.”

  “Why’d she run?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  Daria swiped her thumb across the fingerprint scanner and waited for a beep but none sounded.

  The bank teller, a woman in her twenties who wore thick makeup caked over her acne-scarred face, frowned then pushed the reset button.

  “Again.”

  Daria did. Still no beep. “Is there a problem with the machine?”

  “Sometimes it’s slow.”

  “I’m actually in kind of a rush.”

  And she was god-awful hot in her heavy chador. She wiped a bead of sweat from the top of her forehead, reminded herself to breathe normally, and glanced at her watch—five minutes after seven. Mark would almost certainly be awake by now.

  She hoped he’d have the good sense to take refuge at the embassy.

  “Should I try it again?”

  The machine beeped. “There it goes. Now enter your password.”

  Daria did so and was led to a room in the back of the bank. A minute later the teller placed her safe deposit box on a table in the center of the room.

  “Ring me when you’re done.”

  Daria locked the door from the inside and quickly opened the box. After confirming that a long strand of her hair still lay undisturbed across the top, she pushed her real US passport aside, revealing $2,000, an Iranian passport, an Iranian driver’s license, a second US passport, and a US driver’s license.

  She hastily pocketed the altered documentation and the money and was about to put her real US passport back in the safe deposit box when she stopped herself.

  At this point she should just throw the real one out, she thought. She couldn’t use it again, she’d burned her bridges. And although it had been obtained legally, in reality it was just as fake as the others—just as fake as the first eighteen years of her life had been…

  The drive from Duke University to the little town of Wolf Trap in Fairfax County, Virginia, usually took Daria over four hours, but tonight she pushed her mom’s old BMW hard and did it in nearly three.

  As she turned onto the wooded suburban road where she’d grown up, she wondered whether she was losing her mind. There was the stream she’d tried to dam up with rocks and branches when she was ten, there was tree she’d fallen from and broken her arm…

  She recalled the pushy little man who, just hours ago, had claimed to be her uncle, and shuddered at the thought that he might intrude on this world.

  The large brick Georgian house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac. No light shone from inside. With her parents abroad, the family house was only used these days as a place to gather for holidays.

  And a place to keep records.

  She opened the door, flipped on the lights in the long front foyer, and disabled the burglar alarm by typing in “Penguin”—the name of the rescue-shelter cat she’d picked out on her fifth birthday.

  Everything was deceptively, comfortably normal—the Persian carpets, the pale yellow walls, the photos of her and her family on the walls. This was her home.

  Still, she felt like an intruder as she climbed the steps to the second floor, taking care not to make too much noise.

  Her parents’ bedroom was cavernous, thirty feet long and nearly as wide. On her mother’s side stood a tall
antique armoire, made from gorgeous burled walnut.

  She opened one of the lower drawers and found an expired membership card for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, her mother’s voter registration card, an expired driver’s license, and there, in the back, the card that Daria had remembered seeing years ago, when she’d retrieved her mother’s passport from the very same drawer. She hadn’t examined it closely back then, but she did now: It read American Red Cross Volunteer Blood Donor ID Card, and then it gave her mother’s name, and her blood type: AB.

  Daria hung her head as she crumpled the card in her hand.

  Three months ago, she had given blood at Duke as part of a freshman class blood drive and learned she was type O. And from the advanced placement biology course she’d taken as a senior in high school, she knew that an AB parent couldn’t have a type O child.

  Unless, of course, that child had been adopted.

  After staring dumbfounded at the card for several minutes, Daria lifted her head and noticed her old field hockey stick propped up in a corner of the room. She’d used it in the regional tournament her team had won last year. Her mom had wanted to frame it.

  Without pausing to think, she stood up, retrieved the stick, settled on a good grip, then faced the wall where a framed studio photo of her and her alleged parents hung at eye level. Intellectually, she realized that they’d probably been the good guys. Certainly they’d cared for her as though she’d been their own for eighteen years.

  But they’d also lied to her, and she was furious.

  She swung the field hockey stick into the photo frame, shattering the glass and impaling the photo.

  “Fuck you,” she said, leaving the stick stuck where it was in the wall. “Fuck you all.”

  By eight o’clock Daria was well south of Baku, hurtling down the M3 highway at over a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour in a rented Fiat subcompact.

  She stripped off her headscarf and chador and drove with the windows open, so that the wind rushed though her hair. But every time she blew by a town where there was cell phone reception, she rolled up the windows and placed a call to her uncle in France, the same uncle who had told her who she really was. No one ever answered.

  She told herself she should eat something, that she needed the energy, but she had a sick feeling in her stomach that just wouldn’t quit. Food was the last thing she wanted.

  The coastal desert region gave way to marshland, then wheat fields, and after several hours, to lush green forests with occasional views of the steep, wooded Talysh Mountains to the west.

  In the town of Astara, which sat right on the border with Iran, she parked across from the coral-colored district chess school, on a road that ran through the center of the town. After walking a few blocks, she turned down a partially paved street choked with overgrown grass and crisscrossed from above with low-hanging wires. Weed-strewn piles of bricks lay in front of a few half-built houses. Poorly stocked shops and dilapidated two-story apartment houses lined the rest of the street.

  When Daria finally reached her destination, she put her hands to her mouth, seemingly paralyzed by what she saw.

  Don’t cry, she told herself. You half expected this, didn’t you? Hold it together.

  Hold it together? After all that had happened, what was the point?

  Mark watched with confusion as Daria dropped to her knees.

  Above her loomed a bombed-out building with gaping black holes where windows had once stood. It looked sinister and ugly. A few charred palm trees stood to either side of it. Police barriers had been set up in front of the building, to prevent gawkers from entering, but no one was manning them. The stink of ash and smoke was strong, as though embers from a fire were still smoldering.

  Mark edged closer and saw that Daria was weeping.

  A moment later a tall, gangly man with jet-black hair ran up to her. They embraced and began walking.

  Mark followed but they soon ducked into one of several cafés situated between the Caspian Sea and a long line of diesel trucks waiting to cross the border into Iran.

  He looped around to the rear of the café and hid behind the ruins of an old Ferris wheel that lay rusting on the gray, driftwood-littered beach. From there he had a clear view of the café’s outdoor terrace where a few plastic tables had been set up. Daria and her companion argued for a moment before choosing a table in the corner, as far away as they could get from three men who sat on the terrace playing dominos and smoking.

  Daria’s friend was animated and gesticulating with his hands. He looked young, Mark thought. A bearded waiter brought them tea in clear glasses.

  Mark called Decker and told him to meet him behind the Ferris wheel.

  “And don’t hang up,” he added. “After I stop talking just keep the line open, put your phone in your pocket, and keep quiet.”

  Mark looped back around to the front and approached the café from the street side, so that he remained hidden to Daria and her companion. Inside were a few tables and a deli-style display case sparsely stocked with lamb stew, some wedges of fresh feta cheese in water, and a few packs of imitation Marlboro cigarettes.

  The middle-aged man who’d been waiting on Daria’s table asked Mark if he also wanted to sit outside. Mark said he wasn’t there to eat. He took out his cell phone and two one-hundred-dollar bills from his wallet. He was there, Insh’Allah, to learn the truth about his unfaithful, scheming, lying whore of a wife.

  “What was the leadership’s reaction to the bombing?” asked Daria.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t call them?”

  “I couldn’t.”

  Daria was about to ask why not, but instead she studied Tural. His eyes were bloodshot, his nose a little runny. And he kept tapping his foot under the table. She’d only met him twice before but recalled that, by the time he was ten, he’d lost his mother in a car accident and his father to the Iranian regime. The older brother who’d raised him had just died in the bombing.

  He was a scared nineteen-year-old kid going through absolute hell and she’d hardly noticed because she was so upset herself. One of the women who’d been killed in the bombing had been a friend.

  She put her hand over his own, trying to comfort him. “I’m sorry. I know this hasn’t been easy for you.”

  “I’m OK.”

  He said it in a way that made Daria certain he wasn’t. So she kept her hand on his and grieved silently with him until their waiter arrived with a large basket lined with a checkered cloth and full of flatbread. “We didn’t order bread,” she said. “Only tea.”

  “But you see we have cooked too much.”

  From his long beard and his ring stamped with the name Ali, she figured he was a religious nut who’d taken a fancy to her because she was wearing a full chador.

  He flashed her a creepy smile. “There is no charge. Please.”

  The waiter stood there with the bread basket.

  “OK, OK, leave it,” said Tural, sounding agitated.

  The waiter placed the bread in the center of the table.

  Daria felt exposed here. She needed a refuge, a place to regroup and plan and think. But Tural was afraid his apartment was being watched. She cast a suspicious eye over the men playing dominos. There was no place she felt safe.

  “So why couldn’t you contact the leadership?”

  “My masoul didn’t trust me with the contact information.”

  “Was Yaver able to contact them?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “You said he was hurt. How badly?”

  “Some burns, that’s all. The two of us are the only ones left. So he’s the head of the cell now.”

  “Where is Yaver?”

  “The mountain house.”

  “I’ve never been. Take me there, Tural.”

  Tural hesitated. “How do you know you didn’t bring this on us?”

  “I don’t.”

  “What if the CIA knows you’re working with us?”

 
; “Even if they did, they’d never have done something like this. Never. I know them.”

  At that point Daria noticed a fly buzzing over the flatbread. Because she was frustrated and distraught, she flicked her hand at it with more anger than she might have normally. But the fly returned to settle on the bread.

  “Disgusting.” She picked up the basket and moved it down the table.

  She was about to turn her attention back to Tural when she stopped herself, sensing that something wasn’t right. So she picked up the basket again, this time assessing its weight.

  “What are you doing?” asked Tural.

  Daria removed the rest of the bread, and then the checkered napkin, revealing a cell phone. It was open and on. And she recognized it.

  “Mark! Where are you!”

  “Stay hidden,” Mark told Decker.

  He stood up. After a few moments, Daria began marching toward him across the gray sand beach. They converged in a barren area between the café and the ruined Ferris wheel.

  “Working with the MEK behind the CIA’s back? Nice, Daria. Really nice.”

  The MEK, short for Mojahedin-e Khalq, was an armed Iranian resistance group that had been trying for decades to get rid of the Islamic regime in Iran.

  “You don’t know you’re talking about.”

  “Your buddy Tural used the word masoul. A masoul is an MEK supervisor. You were the one who briefed me on it. Remember that?”

  “Then you should know I was looking to recruit agents from them,” she shot back. “To get information for the CIA. Which is to say, to do my job.”

  They were staring each other down but keeping their distance.

  “How did you find me?” she said.

  “I followed you, how else?”

  “You were sleeping when I left.”

  “Evidently not.”

  “I would have seen you.”

  “You didn’t. You know why?”

  Daria declined to speculate.

  “Because I’m damn good at tailing people.” Mark hoped the binoculars on his chest would distract her from considering the possibility that he’d had help from Decker, who’d rented a second car in Baku. The fact was, she should have spotted at least one of them. It had been poor countersurveillance work on her part that had allowed them to go undetected for so long.