Death of a Spy (7 page)

12

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

When the phone rang and no caller ID showed up, Daria was pretty sure it was Mark. He’d taken to using a top-of-the-line iPad Mini to route phone calls over the Internet, because such calls were harder to trace and intercept. They also didn’t show any caller ID.

She picked up.

“Hey, how’re my gals?”

Daria smiled. It was good to hear his voice. “We’re fine. Lila, say hello to Daddy.” She let Lila stare blankly at the phone for few seconds, then put it back to her ear. “She told me to tell you she misses you.”

“How’s the diaper rash?”

When they’d spoken earlier in the day, Daria had mentioned that she’d taken a long walk around a nearby park, with Lila riding on her chest in a BabyBjörn carrier. Although still a little sore from the delivery, she was eager to get back to her normal weight—she was sick of maternity clothes and dying to wear a normal pair of jeans—and besides, she hadn’t wanted to deal with lugging the stroller down the steep narrow steps that led up to their apartment. She’d also just been restless, and the walk had felt good. All the bouncing around on her chest, though, combined with a wet diaper, had resulted in Lila developing a bit of a rash.

“Not worse,” she said. “Oh, and her umbilical cord fell off.”

She wished Mark had been there for that milestone.

“Wow, already.”

“It was time. Her belly button’s a little red. I swabbed it with alcohol, but it didn’t seem to hurt her.”

“Good to hear.”

“How are things on your end?”

“I’m out of here.”

“That was quick.” Daria hadn’t anticipated that Mark would return for at least another day.

“Larry’s on a plane to Chicago. Things went faster than I thought they would.”

“Well, that’s good news. I guess. Is it?”

“No direct flights to Bishkek tonight, but I was able to get a seat on a flight to Almaty. I’ll just cab it from Almaty to Bishkek early tomorrow. It’ll be faster that way.”

Daria detected a note of unease in Mark’s voice. “So, the medical stuff…”

“The coroner’s report said heart attack. And he was taking Coumadin, which he’d neglected to tell me about. Part of the reason I ask for people’s medical history is so that I don’t have to worry about them dying on the job.”

Mark spoke as if he were just annoyed, but Daria knew better. He’d liked Larry a lot.

“I’m really sorry about all this, Mark. I know how much—”

“Can I ask you a favor?”

“Sure,” said Daria. But Mark’s tone gave her pause. “What?”

“Open my bottom left desk drawer in our office. There’s a couple prepaid phones in there.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You been snooping?”

“What do you need, Mark?”

“Activate the blue one.”

A minute later, the blue phone rang and Daria answered it.

“You got a pen?” asked Mark.

“Give me a sec.” Daria retrieved one, along with a notepad, from a drawer underneath her desktop computer. “OK.”

Mark read off the Internet address and passwords that would be needed to access the storage site where Larry’s most recent photo files had been saved. “Larry took twenty-eight still photos on the morning of June seventh. Would you mind taking a look at them? I’d have Decker or some of my other guys do it, but honestly, I trust you on this more than I do them.”

“What are these photos of?”

“Vehicles and personnel entering and exiting a Russian military base. In South Ossetia. They need to be enlarged with the equipment we have at home, and I’d rather not wait until I get there. Since you can read Russian—”

“Is that what Larry was doing? Staking out a Russian military base?”

“It was a contract for Central Eurasia.”

“For Kaufman.”

“Yeah. Langley detected some unusual movement via satellite, but Kaufman wanted eyes on the ground.”

“You think Larry was killed.” She paused. “What, by the Russians?”

“I’d rather not speculate.”

“Jesus.” A CIA operation—and probably, from what she knew of the Agency, a senseless and stupid one—was a hell of a thing for Larry to have lost his life over, thought Daria. “What am I looking for?”

“I’m not sure. But someone deleted those files from the memory cards Larry had with him. I assume they did it for a reason. I’d start by checking for identifying words or symbols on the men and matériel in the photos. Look for equipment you don’t recognize, new-model vehicles, anything unusual.”

“I’m guessing there’s going to be a lot I won’t recognize.”

While in the CIA, Daria had been trained to identify the military insignia of Azerbaijan—that’s where she’d been posted—and other countries in the region, Russia included. But Iran had been her specialty.

“Do your best, use whatever online resources you can. This is just a preliminary look, Russia specialists at the Agency will eventually pick these photos apart.”

“OK,” said Daria, but what she was thinking was, if that was the case,
why the rush
? Was he just upset about what had happened, and fishing for immediate answers? Or was he worried about something else?

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“You’d…you’d tell me if you were in trouble, wouldn’t you? I mean, after what happened to Larry…”

“I’m not in trouble. There’s just some weird stuff going on that I need to sort out, that’s all.”

Daria thought about that for a moment. She reminded herself that she’d known there’d be times like this; she’d known it when she’d accepted his proposal of marriage. “What weird stuff?”

“I’d rather not get into it at the moment.”

She debated whether to press him further, then said, “OK. I’ll check out the photos and call you back.”

13

Russian Military Base, South Ossetia

“He now goes by Mark Sava,” said the deputy chief of the FSB’s counterintelligence department. “He’s worked the region for years, particularly Azerbaijan.”

When Dmitry Titov had tried to search FSB files for information about the man
he’d
known as Marko Saveljic, nothing had come up. Nor did the FSB have any information on Stephen McDougall—the name on the fake passport Saveljic had used to enter Georgia. So he’d sent a photo of Saveljic—taken at the Dachi hotel—to analysts at FSB headquarters in Moscow. Facial-recognition software had done the rest.

“Not recently,” said Titov. He cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder as he swiped the touchpad on his laptop computer, intending—now that he had a name—to access what FSB records he could on his own. “Or I would have known it.”

“Well, until two and a half years ago he was the CIA’s station chief in Azerbaijan, worked out of the embassy in Baku. Before that he was an operations officer in Azerbaijan, and before that he was all over the Caucasus and Central Asia.”

When Sava had been active in Azerbaijan, Titov had still been in intelligence purgatory, doing penance in Chechnya, just trying to survive. Titov’s promotion to his current position—which might have led to him intersecting with someone of Sava’s stature—had only come recently, after Sava had left the CIA.

The analyst at FSB headquarters added, “We also believe, but aren’t certain, that he served in the CIA’s special activities division in the 1990s. He was operating under a different alias at the time, but we have a likely sighting from 1993 in Abkhazia.”

Titov’s head dipped. So that surly, contemptuous kid hadn’t been scared off by his experience in Georgia in 1991. Titov had imagined that after leaving, Marko Saveljic had stumbled back to the United States thankful just to be alive; that he’d been so emotionally and physically scarred that the rest of his life had been a train wreck. Instead, just three years after leaving Georgia, Sava had shown up in the breakaway Georgian republic of Abkhazia, just in time to meddle in what had been a brutal civil war.

Titov stopped typing on his laptop and gripped the phone. “What’s his reputation?”

Knowing that Larry Bowlan died looking at Katerina’s self-portrait had cheered Titov to no end, but he now realized it had been a terrible mistake to have left that painting in the room. He’d abandoned it, thinking that now that justice had been served, he could let both the painting, and all the memories associated with it, go. But he hadn’t considered that perhaps the one person in the world who
could
have recognized that painting would walk into that room.

“He was one of the best the Americans had. When he ran the CIA station in Azerbaijan, he poisoned many—too many—of the wells we tried to dig there. And he had high-level contacts in the Azeri government. His departure presented an opportunity for us to expand our operations in Azerbaijan.”

“What’s he been doing lately?” asked Titov, although he thought he could guess the answer to that question.

“Private contract work. Mainly for the CIA. He runs a small operation out of Bishkek.”

“I see,” said Titov.

What Titov saw was that Bowlan, although he’d claimed to be a lone-wolf contractor hired by the US Department of Defense to surveil the base in South Ossetia, almost certainly had instead been working with Sava on a CIA contract. Just as Bowlan and Sava had been working together, again for the CIA, twenty-four years earlier.

“Do you need me for anything else, sir?”

“Yes. Find out everything you can about Sava. Where he lives, who he lives with, who he works with, when he eats, where he eats, when he shits, where he shits, when—”

“I’ll need the approval of the director to allocate that kind of manpower to Bishkek.”

“Which is why I will call him. In the meantime, make what preparations you can.”

If all went as planned, Titov’s men would take Sava within the hour, before he left Georgia. An interrogation would follow, to find out whether Sava knew any more than Bowlan had about the upcoming operation. When that happened, Titov wanted to be prepared. If Sava had weaknesses that could be exploited, he wanted to know about them; experience had taught him that without that kind of leverage, Sava would be hard to break.

After the interrogation, of course, they’d have to kill the American; on a purely personal level, Titov would welcome the opportunity to do it himself, but even if he hadn’t borne Sava any personal ill will—and he bore him plenty—abducting and interrogating such a man, and then releasing him so that he could share his unfortunate experience with the CIA, wasn’t practical.

“This American, why does he worry you?”

When it came to dealing with his colleagues in the FSB, Titov was inclined to keep the personal to himself and emphasize the professional—it was enough that Sava was tied to Bowlan, an American spy who’d been snooping around the base here in South Ossetia just days before the launch of the big operation. But Titov didn’t know the extent to which the deputy chief had been briefed on that. So all he said was, “Because it is my job to worry. If the director chooses to say more, that is his prerogative.”

14

Tbilisi, Georgia

Mark suspected he’d picked up a tail.

As he purchased an
International Herald Tribune
from a newsstand inside the terminal, he noted that, fifty feet away, next to a kiosk that sold tacky plastic drinking horns and snow-globe reproductions of medieval churches, a guy wearing jeans and a blue hoodie was seated on a bench, tapping nonstop on his phone. A backpack lay by his feet. Sunglasses were pushed up on his lacquered black hair.

Not so different from hundreds of other guys Mark might have expected to see on the streets of Tbilisi.

But Mark had noted a few anomalies. For one, the guy was dressed as if he were a club-hopping twentysomething. But his black hair was gray at his temples. And he wore a wedding ring. And the camera on the back of his phone was often pointed right at Mark.

Mark had been planning to go through security and wait by his gate, but he had another hour before his flight boarded, so instead he shouldered his satchel, picked up the plastic shopping bag he was using to carry Larry’s electronic equipment, and took a stroll outside. As he darted across two lanes of traffic and into the parking lot opposite the terminal, he observed that the guy with the backpack had also left the terminal; he was standing a hundred feet away, near the road that paralleled the parking lot, looking like he was trying to hail a cab.

Mark wasn’t shocked. He was often tailed by foreign intelligence services. And if Keal had been CIA, as Mark suspected, well, maybe the Georgians or Russians or whoever just thought—correctly—that Mark was guilty by association. He took heart from the fact that the backpack guy appeared to be operating alone; had he been part of a larger team, someone else almost certainly would have handled the exterior surveillance.

Mark made a show of pulling a pen and pad of paper out of his satchel and pretending to record the license plate numbers of two random cars—let the backpack guy waste time puzzling that out, he thought—then headed back toward the terminal, intending to surreptitiously snap a quick photo of his tail on the way inside. He made it as far as the end of the parking lot, and was preparing to traverse the two-lane road, when he sensed a shadow on his left, and caught a brief whiff of a menthol cigarette.

Out of the corner of his left eye, he saw that he was being overtaken by a blue van, and came to the split-second realization he was being played for a fool. Stopping short, he turned to his right and made eye contact with a broad-shouldered bearded man who was tossing a cigarette to the ground. With one hand Mark threw his newspaper into the man’s face and with the other, jabbed a thumb into his eye.

The van came to a quick stop just as someone inside it yanked the cargo door open. Mark jumped in front of the van, smacking the hood hard as he did so, then cried out in pain, and fell to the ground—attracting concerned looks from travelers gathered near the terminal entrance.

“Idiot!” yelled Mark in Russian as he picked himself up off the ground.

The bearded man was clutching his eye, but advancing.

As Mark backed away from the van, he pointed a finger at the driver. “Watch where the fuck you’re going!”

The cargo door of the van slammed shut. The bearded man glanced at the van as though confused and not sure what to do, but by now Mark was safely surrounded by the people gathered near the terminal entrance.

Stupid
, thought Mark as he caught his breath inside the terminal. He’d come within a hairsbreadth of being abducted. The guy with the backpack had probably been bait, sent into the terminal with a lousy disguise, and snapping photos with his smartphone to goad a stupid American into trying to flush out a tail.

He massaged the thumb he’d used to poke the bearded guy in the eye. After what had happened to Larry he should have been paying more attention, watching for that van, or something like it, anticipating that someone might try to grab him. If he’d been anticipating instead of reacting, they never would have gotten close.

But who were they? The Russians? Maybe. Probably. Did it have anything to do with this business about Katerina? Mark had no idea. What he did know was that he was getting too old to count on being able to fight his way out of scrapes. He needed to look harder for paths of least resistance. Use his brain to avoid conflict, so that he didn’t wind up like Larry.

He took a few more deep breaths—he was still a bit shaken, although he didn’t like to admit it—looked around him, and decided that, just then, the path of least resistance led through the passenger-screening security checkpoint. Once he was past that, in the secure zone of the airport, the chance of anyone being able to pull off an abduction was close to zero.

In retrospect, he realized he should have headed straight there in the first place.

After passing through the checkpoint, Mark found a coffee shop near his departure gate and took a seat where he had a wall at his back and a clear view of anyone entering the shop. To his left was a service door exit.

He ordered a double espresso, and downed it right away. When Daria called him back on his iPad, which was connected to the Wi-Fi at the coffee shop, he was sipping a vodka on the rocks.

“I copied and cropped the photos from June seventh,” she said, “focusing on any identifying marks I could make out. They were all taken from the same vantage point of the earlier photos, so I didn’t worry about the visible buildings or anything else that’s consistent across all the dates.”

“And?”

“Two Tenth Brigade
spetsnaz
guys, another guy who I believe was VV.”

Spetsnaz
referred to any number of Russian special forces units. Mark assumed plenty were in and around the base at South Ossetia, especially those from the Tenth Brigade, which was known to operate in the region; VV—short for
vnutrennye voiska
—referred to troops controlled by the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs. Though they were common too, there were special units within the VV that, if present, would have raised red flags.

“The VV guy, was he North Caucus or—”

“Couldn’t tell. I extracted a head shot for him and everyone else that I could, and enlarged and enhanced all identifying marks, so maybe you can make more sense of it. There was another guy who was a general whose last name begins with Golo—it was a side shot, the rest of the name on his uniform wasn’t visible. Plenty of Forty-Ninth Army troops too, but that’s to be expected.”

“Yeah, that’s their backyard.”

“There was one guy in civilian clothes who got dropped off in a cab. His back was to the camera, but the duffle bag he was carrying had a sticker on it with the letters NAJ. I wasn’t sure what it was at first, but I did a little research—that’s the code for the main airport in Nakhchivan.”

“Nakhchivan?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s kind of random.” Nakhchivan was a tiny scrap of land wedged between Turkey, Iran, and Armenia. Though it was technically a part of Azerbaijan, Nakhchivan was an exclave, to Azerbaijan what Alaska was to the continental US, in that it wasn’t physically connected to the main part of the country.

“Yeah, I thought so too.”

“I’ll put together a full report for Kaufman when I get back, but in the meantime could you shoot me encrypted copies of the crops you made, and write out what you just told me?”

“Already on it. Check your e-mail.”

“Thanks. How’s Lila?”

“Sleeping.”

Mark considered telling Daria about Katerina, but explaining to his wife that he’d just been blindsided by a self-portrait of a former lover was a much longer conversation than he wanted to have at the moment. They’d have plenty of time to talk about all that when he got back home. And he also saw no point in mentioning that he’d almost been abducted, and that, upon landing in Almaty in the morning, he planned to spend a lot of time making sure that no one was still on his tail. He had to make sure he was perfectly clean before coming anywhere near Bishkek. Why worry her about all that? “All right, talk soon.”

“Travel safe.”

“Always.”

Still connected to the Wi-Fi signal at the coffee shop, Mark called Ted Kaufman’s secure landline in Langley, Virginia, where it was morning.

“Larry’s en route.” Mark started to bring Kaufman up to speed on what had transpired over the course of the day. But, as with Daria, he left out the bit about the painting—that angle was far too unsettled, too strange, too raw for him to be able to draw any conclusions from it. He needed to get a better handle on what was going on before he mentioned that to anyone.

He was relaying Larry’s flight information, when Kaufman interrupted.

“Hold on, let me get a pen. Actually, screw it. Just e-mail me what I need to know. Talk to me more about these missing photos.”

“Daria just put together a preliminary report—”

“Daria, as in Daria Buckingham?”

“Yeah. As in my wife.”

“I knew you’d married a trait—”

“Don’t go there.”

“—but now you’ve got her working for you? Nice to know. Brilliant move, Sava.”

Daria hadn’t just quit the CIA the way Mark had. She’d been kicked out because her idealistic streak had led her to do some things that she shouldn’t have. Mark had long since forgiven her, but Kaufman hadn’t.

“She’s just helping out in a pinch.”

“She’s not the one with the clearance. You are.”

“You want the preliminary intel on the missing photos?”

“What have you got?”

Mark started to repeat what Daria had told him.

“Back up,” said Kaufman. “Did you say Nakhchivan?”

“Yeah. Why?”

No response.

“Ted?”

“You sure on that?”

“No, I haven’t even looked at Daria’s crops yet. I’m just telling you what she told me.”

“What else could those letters stand for?”

“A lot of things probably.”

“But she thinks it’s an airport security sticker.”

“Yeah. The kind they slap on your bags after they inspect them.” Mark waited a moment, then said, “We good?”

He heard tapping on a computer keyboard, then a sigh. Finally, Kaufman said, “Listen, Sava. What if, instead of heading back to Bishkek, you were to hold tight for a bit? While I check something out.”