The Colonel's Mistake (14 page)

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.