The Colonel's Mistake (4 page)

Mark hailed a cab and got dropped off near the crenellated walls of medieval Baku. At a street-level Turkish breakfast buffet, he bought a round piece of
simit
bread and black tea to go.

A short walk brought him to a 125-year-old limestone mansion. Covered in gnarled grapevines and topped with gargoyles, it was a relic of Baku’s first oil-boom years, when rich Europeans like the Nobels and the Rothschilds had developed the oil fields in and around the city. Following the Cold War, the mansion had proved attractive to the CIA because after seventy years of vodka-swilling Russians using it as an overcrowded tenement house, no one had questioned the need to completely gut the place—making it easy for the Agency to install all the surveillance and security equipment that was needed.

Mark pushed the button on the intercom to the left of the brass plate that read
Trudeau House International, Inc.
, allegedly a financial services company run by expatriate Canadians.

He’d get in and get out, he thought as he tapped his foot impatiently, taking a swig of tea and looking up at one of the gargoyles, a smiling chimera.

It was seven thirty. By eight thirty, he figured, he could be back at his apartment. He wouldn’t get much sleep, but if he pounded
enough Turkish coffee this afternoon he’d be able to get some work done.

As he waited for a response, he wondered if the place had changed much since he’d left. He remembered a large oak receptionist’s desk in the entrance hall and well-appointed offices where the Trudeau House’s clients—mainly Azeris with newfound oil wealth and connections to the upper echelons of government—were wooed with excellent CIA-subsidized investment returns. The upper levels housed five additional offices that had sat vacant, waiting for operations officers who had been expected but had never arrived.

Mark felt a spike in his anxiety level until he reminded himself that he’d left all that political crap behind. He’d changed since quitting the Agency, he thought, and for the better. Teaching college kids about international relations, building a sand castle on the beach with a kid and his mom—those were the kinds of things that were important to him now.

No one responded to the intercom. He pushed the button again and waited, for longer this time. Again, nothing. Someone should have been there by now, asking politely what the hell he wanted. Unless standards had really slipped under Logan, which Mark thought probable.

He rang one more time and then walked to the end of the block. He turned right, then right again, down an alley that ran behind the Trudeau House and a series of adjacent buildings. He stopped at a steel door that had a small keypad above the knob. The security codes were changed on a weekly basis, but he’d helped implement the system and knew an override code that had worked in the past.

He typed in the code, opened the door, and descended a flight of stairs into a bare basement with a low ceiling and a stained but clean concrete floor. At the far end of the room stood another steel door. He typed in a second override code and this door opened as well.

“Hello?”

He ascended a staircase that led into a narrow back hallway on the first floor. He called out again, more loudly this time.

Still no answer. When he opened the door to the interior of the Trudeau House, no one greeted him, a lapse he found deeply unsettling. By now security should have been there. The entrance to the room where all the exterior camera feeds were monitored was a few feet ahead. The door was cracked open a few inches, another anomaly.

He knocked briefly before pushing the door open. Everything was in its place—the security monitors, a black swivel chair, a metal desk, and the central computer, which was used to set all the security codes. Only the guard was missing. Then Mark noticed that all the security monitor disks—which normally lined the shelves on the back wall—had disappeared.

He backed out of the room and slowly made his way, via another narrow hallway, to the formal entrance hall in the front of the building. Before opening the door, he paused for a moment, listening for sounds of people on the other side. All he could hear was the hum of the central air conditioner and the muted rumble of cars on the street.

He turned the doorknob. As he stepped into the entrance hall, he noticed that the beige carpet and the cream-colored wall behind the oak desk were stained dark brown with…he squinted, trying to make it out…

His eyesight was going. He really should get contacts, he thought.

Mark looked down at his feet and saw that he’d inadvertently stepped on a piece of human tissue, from what body part he couldn’t begin to guess. The brown on the wall was dried blood. Three feet to his left, a body lay facedown, perfectly still, arms at his sides, palms up. A puddle of light from a street-facing window illuminated the man’s head, a portion of which was missing. Beyond him, Mark could see more bodies.

He pivoted, and the thought of running back the same way he’d come crossed his mind. But if the killers were still in the building, they most certainly already knew he was there. If they wanted to take him out, then he was already dead. He didn’t have a weapon. His heart was going like crazy.

Mark turned his gaze back to the main room. Once he really started looking, he couldn’t stop himself from staring, struck by the fact that he’d been alive for as long as he had, that he hadn’t just accidentally cut himself and bled to death. Because the people in front of him reminded him that bleeding to death was a terribly easy thing to do.

He approached the bodies so that he could see who they were. One was the security guard. He’d died with his gun drawn in front of a tiled fireplace. The body Mark had first noticed he now identified as a twenty-five-year-old operations officer, a man who’d been posing as a Canadian financial wizard. He’d been a top recruit from MIT and Mark had been his mentor. The third was a matronly Canadian woman who’d served as the administrator of the Trudeau House without ever knowing it was a CIA front company. She was slumped against the wall behind her desk, beneath an elongated brass sconce. Her chair had fallen over, likely pushed away, Mark
thought, as she’d scrambled to try to save herself. All the bodies were riddled with bullet holes; Mark counted twenty, even thirty in each of them.

He breathed slowly, gaping at the scene sprawled out before him, searing the visual image into his memory. He wondered what could have led to such a brazen, unprecedented attack. The CIA had been operating in Baku ever since the Soviet Union had fallen apart, and no one had ever been killed. It was considered a friendly posting. The fact that the CIA had let him stay in Baku after resigning stood as a testament to that.

But it was a friendly posting in a bad neighborhood, with Iran to the south, Russia and Chechnya to the north, and a simmering civil war with the Armenians to the west. Somehow, Mark thought, his mind racing, some of that violence must have spilled over. A levee had broken.

He searched the first-floor offices. They were empty and undisturbed. On the second floor, near the top of the carpeted steps, he found another dead operations officer and chief of station George Logan. Logan’s chest had a big hole where his heart should have been. The way the blood had seeped out made it look as though he had little wings growing out of his back.

Logan had been a Washington desk jockey with little experience abroad, Mark recalled. He bent down to pick up one of the spent bullet cartridges, his hand shaking a bit despite his admonitions to himself to stay centered. The kind of guy that, when Mark was feeling cynical, made him think that maybe the CIA’s overreliance on technology wasn’t such a bad thing after all.

Mark hadn’t thought Logan deserved his own station. But the man sure as hell hadn’t deserved this.

Port of Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates

The soldier lay hidden beneath a canvas tarp, on top of a battered red shipping container that rested on three others and was surrounded by thousands more. Beyond this vast field of containers stood a row of yellow rust-stained cranes. Beyond the cranes, across an expanse of calm water, loomed the
USS Ronald Reagan.

The soldier’s digital camera made steady clicking sounds as he zoomed in on each section of the massive aircraft carrier.

Over a thousand feet long, the
Reagan
was one of eleven nuclear-powered Nimitz-class aircraft carriers in existence. As the weak light of dawn grew stronger, the soldier grew bored and started imagining all the riveters and welders and electricians and nuclear technicians who must have been needed to put the thing together. But the more he thought about it, the harder it was for him to conceive that something so colossal could have been created by human hands.

Mark called Ted Kaufman, his former division chief, from a secure line in the Trudeau House.

“
How many bodies
?” demanded Kaufman.

“Five.” Mark listed their names.

“Christ.”

The line went silent except for Kaufman’s breathing. Mark imagined the panic that was setting in. He’d heard that Kaufman had been a decent operations officer decades ago, but as a division chief he’d proved to be much better at avoiding crises than managing them when they hit. Between Campbell’s assassination and now the slaughter at the Trudeau House, Mark figured Kaufman was now facing the biggest crisis of his career. The Baku station was under siege.

“I think you have to assume all of your Azeri assets are in danger,” said Mark. “Daria in particular. Gobustan is anything but secure. And I would not want to be a woman around some of those guards.”

“Dammit all.” The line went silent again. Then, recovering himself, Kaufman said, “We’ll get a forensic team to the Trudeau House within twenty-four hours. In the meantime, get the hell out of there. And don’t, I repeat, don’t let the Azeris know what
happened. I don’t want them screwing up the scene before our guys get there.”

“What are you going to do about Daria?”

“I’ll handle it.”

Mark wondered how Kaufman intended to “handle it,” given that Kaufman’s knowledge of the intricacies of Azerbaijan and Azeri politics was limited at best. Kaufman, although responsible for the whole Central Eurasian Division, was a Russia specialist. Azerbaijan was an afterthought for him.

Which meant that, ultimately, the job of protecting Daria would be left to either the US ambassador—a political appointee who didn’t even speak Azeri and had been on the job for only four months—or the CIA’s junior in-country officers. It occurred to Mark, however, that after what had happened at the Trudeau House, the CIA might not even have any officers besides Daria left in Azerbaijan.

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s implosion, Azerbaijan had been deemed crucial because it had gobs of oil and bordered Iran and Russia; but after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the US focus had shifted to the war zones and the whole Azeri station had been downsized.

“Try going through Orkhan,” said Mark. “He’s the only guy we’re tight with who can spring her.”

“I said I’d handle it.”

Mark thought again of all the people dead at the Trudeau House and concluded that Kaufman, safely ensconced in a nice house in suburban Virginia, wasn’t up to handling squat.

“What was the Baku station working on that could have led to this kind of blowback?” Mark asked.

“Nothing.”

“So this was just a coincidence?”

“Don’t give me that crap.”

Mark was about to end the conversation when Kaufman added, “So after we got the news about Campbell, I spoke with the Azeri ambassador. She told me Campbell specifically requested that Daria be his translator at the convention.”

“Did they know each other?”

“You tell me.”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then why would he ask for her by name?”

“I’ve got no idea.”

“You worked with Daria for two years,” said Kaufman. “You know her better than I do. Any chance the Azeris are onto something?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning Daria survived on the same day a former deputy secretary of defense, along with nearly all my officers in Baku, were killed. Do you think it’s within the realm of possibility that she was somehow involved with what happened?”

“Listen to me, Ted. You need to lock down the entire Baku station and get your remaining ops officers under protection. Including Daria. She’s your best asset over here, believe me. Then find out who hit us, and hit back hard. Blow them out of the fucking water. End of story. Daria’s clean.”

“It was a close call whether to even post her abroad.”

The doubts about Daria’s loyalty, Mark knew, stemmed from the fact that she was the product of a mixed marriage. Her mother was Iranian—hence her Iranian first name—and her father was American with English roots, hence the Buckingham.

The one time Mark had come across something vaguely suspicious regarding Daria—charges on a personal credit card that suggested she was traveling to a region outside of her declared area of operations—it turned out she’d been visiting an orphanage. On her own time. For the purpose of donating $500. When Mark had investigated the payment, he’d learned it had come from her modest personal bank account and had gone directly toward food and medicine for the kids. And when he’d investigated the orphanage, he’d learned that it was just a straight-up charity, with no ties to terrorists or corrupt money-launderers.