The Colonel's Mistake (16 page)

“Working for the CIA.”

“The MEK wanted someone on the inside, someone who could let them know what America was really up to. So I studied Farsi and international law. I practiced taking polygraph tests. It worked. I applied to the CIA and was accepted.” She paused before saying, “That’s it. Now you know. Kaufman was right—you shouldn’t have trusted me. I’m sorry I used you. I’m sorry for everything.”

Mark considered how oblivious he’d been, how easy he’d been to fool. “Did you ever sell out any of your CIA agents?”

“No, never. I just had multiple loyalties, that’s all.”

“Multiple loyalties,” Mark repeated, remembering the slaughter at the Trudeau House. Treason was another word for it.

“You know as well as I do that I gave the Agency a lot of good information.” Daria jabbed a finger at him. “Information I would never have been able to get if it hadn’t been for my relationship with the MEK. And the MEK and the CIA both want to take down the mullahs. They should be working together anyway. It’s stupid that they’re not.”

Mark said, “You have ties to the CIA and MEK, and both were hit. The attacks have some connection to you, Daria.”

“But I don’t know what the connection is. Nor do I know why Campbell was killed. Or why someone tried to kill you.”

“But you still know a lot more than you’re telling me, don’t you?”

This time Daria didn’t even try to lie.

By now Tural had reached them. Mark stepped back a foot, prepared to defend himself, but Tural breezed by him on his way to a beat-up Russian version of a Vespa motor scooter. It was parked in front of a run-down hotel that catered to Iranian men looking for cheap sex just over the border—
Love Rooms
read a sign in Farsi. Tural hopped on the scooter and Daria took a seat behind him.

“I can’t just let you just go,” said Mark.

Daria turned so that she was facing him. Her face was contorted into an expression that fell somewhere between despair and rage. Her chador slipped open, and she gripped the handle of the pistol, holding it so tightly that Mark worried she was going to inadvertently shoot herself. She didn’t point it at him, but said, “You don’t have a fucking choice.”

Mark stuck a new SIM card in his phone and called Decker.

“They just took off. Watch the road leading back out of town. She’s probably headed for the mountains and that’s the only way to get there.”

He jogged back to his Lada, which was still parked by the café. As he started driving out of town, Decker called back.

“They just passed me. They’re now in a black Land Cruiser, an old beater with a roof rack.”

“They see you?”

“No way. I haven’t even pulled out yet.”

“Follow them, but stay far back. I’ll be coming up behind you.”

A few minutes later, Decker called again to say that the Land Cruiser had turned left onto a dirt road.

“I see it and I see you. Fall off, I’ll lead from here.”

The road was a muddy and rutted disaster. Mark’s Lada labored through enormous potholes and up sharp inclines as it tackled the foothills of the Talysh Mountains, where thick hardwood forests grew between citrus groves and fields planted with tobacco and tea leaves.

Little private roads frequently branched off, leading to farmhouses with sedge-grass roofs. And unlike the relatively straight coastal highway, where sight lines of a half mile or more were
common, this road twisted and turned, rendering Mark’s binoculars useless. Which meant that, once he caught up to the Land Cruiser, he had no choice but to stay close behind, sometimes within a couple hundred yards.

“I think someone’s following us,” said Tural, sounding a little panicky.

He’d been staring intently out the back window for the last minute.

“The gray Lada.” Daria glanced at the rearview mirror. She’d insisted on driving, given how agitated Tural was.

“You’ve seen it?”

She had—several times on the more open stretches of road. “It’s a common car.”

“What if it’s that CIA guy?”

Daria checked her rearview mirror again but couldn’t see anyone behind them now. “It couldn’t be.”

“He followed you all the way from Baku.”

“We left him on foot in Astara.”

“He could have run back to his car.”

“Fast enough for him to see where we went? To follow us?”

Tural went back to peering anxiously out the back window. “If it’s not him, then—”

“Then it’s just a farmer—”

“Or whoever hit us in Astara.”

It was a possibility, Daria knew, although she hadn’t wanted to alarm Tural by voicing her fears. She wondered whether someone had been watching the burned-out safe house in Astara.

“Go faster!”

The Land Cruiser was already bouncing all over the road. But Daria sped up a bit more anyway.

“Are you armed?” she asked Tural.

“No.”

They skidded around several turns before rounding a tight curve and nearly driving into a pile of rocks that had slid down a steep bank, blocking the road.

She threw the Land Cruiser into reverse and backed up, preparing to gun it through a narrow detour had been cut into the lower bank.

Just then, the gray Lada rounded a corner and stopped suddenly, fifty feet or so behind her, close enough that she was able to see, and recognize, the driver.

No, it couldn’t be.

But it was. Somehow he’d found her. Again. And she’d let it happen.

“Asshole!” she yelled, slamming her hands down on the steering wheel, infuriated at herself, and him. “Asshole!”

She flipped Mark the bird, threw the car into drive, and slammed her foot down on the accelerator.

No more screwing around, she told herself. This time she was going to stop him for good.

After ten minutes, the road dead-ended without warning. Mark had lost sight of the Land Cruiser for the last mile, and there was no sign of it now. In front of him rose a steep rocky outcropping, marking the end of the foothills and the beginning of the real mountains. He got out of the car and climbed it, and from the top had a decent view of the land below—a vast green expanse that ended sharply in the distance at the blue sea’s edge.

Maybe a half mile or so away he saw a farmhouse, in front of which the black Land Cruiser was parked.

Mark called Decker then jogged back down the road, looking for the turnoff he knew he must have missed. It came up soon on the left, hidden by large oak-tree branches that had been dragged in front of the entrance. He pulled them away, revealing a path. The long grass that covered it had been recently matted down by car wheels in two long parallel strips.

Mark walked for a quarter mile along the edge of an overgrown citrus grove where unpicked lemons and oranges were rotting on the trees. Eventually a modest one-story house appeared in the distance. It was surrounded by a clay privacy wall common to Muslim homes. The Land Cruiser was parked in front of the wall.

Behind him, Daria said, “That’s far enough.”

Mark turned around slowly. Daria was gripping a pistol with both hands, and she was pointing it at him.

Washington, DC

Colonel Henry Amato and his boss, National Security Advisor James Ellis, were alone in Ellis’s West Wing corner office when a call from the deputy director of the FBI was patched through on speakerphone.

“Campbell was shot twice, once in the chest, once in the head,” said the deputy director, reading from a preliminary forensic report. “Spent shell casings recovered at the scene were from a 7.62 mm rifle cartridge. Same goes for the casings we recovered at the Trudeau House.”

“All fired from the same gun?” asked Amato.

“Two guns were used at the Trudeau House. Whether one of them was the same gun used to kill Campbell, we don’t know yet. The bullets that killed Campbell are still in him and we won’t be able to do a ballistics analysis until after the autopsy later today. The one thing I can tell you about the bullets we recovered from the Trudeau House is that they indicate there were significant flaws in the barrels of the guns from which they were fired. Which leads us to believe they were probably knockoffs, likely of an M-14 or Heckler & Koch G3.”

“Both models the Iranians have been known to copy,” said Amato. “Has your forensic team in Baku gotten in contact with Mark Sava yet?”

“That’s the guy who discovered the bodies at the Trudeau House?”

“The same.”

“We’re still waiting for the Agency to reel him in.”

“Did they say when that’s going to happen? I mean, you have told them you need to talk to Sava, no? And this Buckingham woman who’s with him?”

“I share your frustration, sir.”

Daria and Sava wouldn’t survive for long alone out there, thought Amato. Not with the resources Aryanpur had in Azerbaijan.

Amato felt the tightness in his chest again. And the need to do something.

Daria moved to the center of the path. Tural stood to her left, his eyes darting nervously from Daria to Mark.

On Daria’s right stood a dark-haired man with a large rabbitlike overbite and bright white teeth. He wore brown dress slacks, a short-sleeved button-down shirt, and plastic sandals that revealed dirty toes. And he was gripping a scuffed-up AK-47 with a relaxed confidence that Mark found disturbing. The man’s trigger finger rested just outside the trigger well, and the rifle barrel pointed slightly downward. His feet were about shoulder-width apart and staggered. To the untrained eye, he might have looked like a guy just casually holding a gun, but Mark recognized a classic firing stance when he saw one.