The Colonel's Mistake (2 page)

Mark looked at Nika as she finished buttoning her blouse. She was roughly his height, with a full chest and hips that could appear either matronly or sexy depending on what she was wearing. And she was a true Azeri, born and raised in Azerbaijan, which meant she could be stubborn as hell. Mark saw that she was determined to stay put, decided maybe it was for the better, and opened the door.

Five men stood in front of him. Four were young guys, barely eighteen, he figured, whose uniforms were a little too big for them.

The fifth—the one holding the gun—was shorter, fatter, and older than the others. A brass star was affixed to the center of his cap.

“What can I do for you, officers?”

“Mark Sava?”

“Yes.”

The brass-star Azeri glanced behind him, prompting two of his young recruits to step forward and grab Mark by the elbows.

“Get your fucking hands off me.”

“You can’t do this!” yelled Nika as Mark was being pushed out the door.

“Call the American embassy,” he said. “Tell them what’s happened.”

Nika followed them down the hall, calling out for help. When the security officers got to the elevator, the brass-star guy turned around and pointed a pistol at her head.

“Get back.”

“
Pokhuvu ye
,” she said.
Eat your shit.

The elevator doors closed and the men descended to the ground floor. Mark was escorted out of the building and shoved into the back of a prisoner transport van. Before closing the van doors, the Azeris handcuffed him and locked the chain connecting his handcuffs to a bolt on the floor.

“Where are you taking me?”

They ignored him.

“I have friends,” said Mark as the doors were closing. “Orkhan Gambar, even Aliyev. Don’t do something you’ll regret.”

After an hour the van came to an abrupt stop, and the back doors were yanked open. He looked out at an enormous stone building, lit by powerful xenon arc lights and encircled by a rusted ten-foot-tall chain-link fence. Beyond the fence lay only darkness and barren desert.

With a stifling feeling of dread, Mark realized he knew exactly where he was.

Two men unshackled his hands from the floor, grabbed him by the elbows, and frog-marched him to the entrance of the building.

“What am I being charged with?”

“You’re not being charged with anything.” Someone gave him a sharp push. “It’s your friend you have to worry about.”

“What friend?”

Daria Buckingham sat huddled on the concrete floor of an unbearably hot cell, her arms wrapped around her knees. Stone walls, grimy and black from the hands of previous prisoners, enclosed her on three sides. Boyishly slender, she looked much younger than her thirty-two years.

Mark approached to within a few inches of the metal bars that formed the fourth side of the cell. The only light came from a single bulb, which dangled from a thin electric wire. The nearby cells were empty and the guards had disappeared, although Mark assumed they were close. A small video camera sat on a tripod right outside the cell. The recording light was on.

Daria stood up, wobbling a bit because the heel from one of her black leather pumps had broken off. She wore a pleated black skirt and a frilly short-sleeved silk blouse. Her face was smudged with dirt.

“Jesus, Daria.”

“It’s a long story.” She held her head high and tried to smile, but her attempt at bravado wasn’t convincing.

“You OK?”

“I’m fine.”

Her face—ordinarily striking, marked by high cheekbones and a wide, pretty smile—was distorted with lines of worry.

“What are you doing here? What am I doing here?”

Gobustan Prison was a strict regime prison that housed many of Azerbaijan’s criminals and political prisoners. Mark knew Daria was neither. She was a CIA operative, and a privileged one at that—the daughter of wealthy Washington diplomats, a product of Duke University and Georgetown Law.

“They’re holding me as a suspect.”

“For what?” Mark took a step closer to her and lightly gripped the metal bars of the cell.

“You didn’t hear?”

He slowly shook his head.

“Wasn’t it on TV?”

“I got rid of my TV.”

She approached the bars of the cell and placed her hands over his own. “Jack Campbell was assassinated,” she whispered urgently.

Mark remembered a competent, uncontroversial deputy secretary of defense who had served for two years and retired over a decade ago.

“Where?”

“Here! In Baku, at the oil convention. Shot in the head.”

In years past Mark had always attended the big annual international oil and gas convention in downtown Baku. But this year he’d forgotten that it was even taking place.

“It happened this afternoon, around four.”

At four Mark had still been at the beach with Nika and her nine-year-old son, helping to build an enormous sand castle. When they’d finally left, Nika’s son had asked to listen to a Russian pop music station on the car radio. After knocking back four beers on the beach, Mark had been game for anything. No one had bothered with the news.

“He was here for the convention. Somebody killed him a couple minutes before he was supposed to give his speech.” Daria paused. “I was alone with him when he was shot, Mark. Standing right next to him, in one of the back rooms off the stage. It was awful.”

Mark stared at her for a moment. “Why were you alone with him?”

“I was assigned to be his translator.” She relayed the details of the shooting, adding that she’d had her gun on her and had tried to shoot back. “The Azeris found me next to Campbell. I was trying to help him, trying to keep his head together, but it was just me and it all kept coming and coming…When the Azeris showed up,
they pulled me off him and now they think I had something to do with it.”

Mark looked at the smudges on Daria’s face. They weren’t dirt, he realized.

She gripped his hands tighter—which made Mark uneasy. Despite Daria’s petite size, of all the CIA operations officers who’d worked under him she’d been the most capable of taking care of herself. For her to be this rattled, he suspected things were even worse than she was letting on.

He tried to read in her eyes the things that she might not want to say aloud, in front of the video camera. And he wondered why she’d felt the need to be carrying a gun at the convention.

“The embassy know you’ve been taken?”

“The Iranian embassy does.”

“Great.”

Daria must have had her fake Iranian passport on her when she’d been arrested, Mark realized. Which meant the Azeris would feel free to treat her like shit.

“The guards messing with you?”

She shrugged.

“What happened?”

Daria felt a sharp push from behind.

“Sür∂tl∂!” Faster!

Although she was blindfolded, the chorus of fuck-me suck-me catcalls and din of inmates banging on metal bars told her she was inside some kind of prison.

She was led down one hall, and then another. The banging stopped. A key turned in a door lock. Someone pushed her forward and removed her blindfold, revealing a metal cot and a filthy toilet hole.

One of her three guards kicked her inside the prison cell with a foot to her backside. As she rose to her knees, she felt a prickly beard on the nape of her neck, then wet lips, then a nose.

Instinctively she snapped her head straight back as hard as she could.

The guard behind her reacted by clubbing the side of her head with his fist. She scurried across the floor, quickly zeroed in on another guard—the one wearing a wedding ring, the one looking ashamed—made eye contact with him, and held it.

“Buyurun! Please!” she called out as she tried to fend off the guard with the bleeding nose.

“Get off her!” said the ashamed-looking guard. “She’s evidence! I’m not losing this job because of your dick.”

The guards had backed off. The cell door had clanged shut.

But she had made an enemy.

“How bad was it?”

Daria looked at Mark, trying to gauge whether it was worth telling him. He had a sharp, square jaw and dark, heavy-lidded, wide-set brown eyes that made him look a little mean. But he’d never been mean to her. He was only average height, his hands were smallish, his palms smooth, and his hair was beginning to gray. Prior to serving as chief of station/Azerbaijan, he’d been an analyst.

She thought of the guards and found it easy to imagine one of them grabbing Mark by the collar of his dress shirt and beating the piss out of him.

“Just words,” she said.

“How’d your shirt get ripped?”

“Listen, I told the guards that you knew me and that you could help put things right. They already had my ATM card. I said I’d give them my PIN if they would just let me contact you.”

“I severed all my contacts with the Agency six months ago, Daria. For real, I don’t even consult.”

She could tell he was speaking carefully, for the benefit of the video camera. And she suspected he was stretching the truth. But he was no longer running the Azeri station, and that was what counted.

“I didn’t have anyone else I could turn to.”

Which wasn’t true. But she was hoping Mark would understand that she couldn’t risk contacting any active CIA officers who were stationed in Baku—that she’d contacted him, a former CIA station chief who’d worked closely with the Azeri intelligence
service over the years, in order to hint at her relationship to the CIA, so the Azeris wouldn’t think she was an Iranian assassin, without completely blowing her cover.

Mark stared at her until she dropped her hands from his, turned her head, and said, “I’m sorry for dragging you into this. I thought maybe they’d just call you and—”

“What do you need, Daria? If I can help I will.”

“Make sure the right people know I’m here,” she said. “And do it as quickly as you can. That’s all.”