by Dan Mayland
“Did you hear what he called me?”
“You ever think of working for the State Department? You’d make a good diplomat.”
“What are you doing here?”
Mark was the owner Global Intelligence Solutions, a small spies-for-hire firm based in Bishkek. He and his firm helped provide security for CIA and State Department employees operating out of the embassy in Bishkek, did intel work for multinationals operating in Central Asia, translated communications that had been intercepted by the NSA, and showered cash on local politicians and businessmen in exchange for confidential information.
Decker was Mark’s right-hand man and had been running the day-to-day operation of the business for the last ten days while Mark took what amounted to paternity leave. But Decker lived across town in a tiny one-bedroom house with his Australian girlfriend; if some routine problem had come up, he would have just called.
Upon considering Mark’s question, Decker’s expression changed, as though he’d just remembered why he’d come. “Listen, you got a sec?”
“Sure.” Decker proceeded to just stand there, without saying anything, so Mark added, “Why don’t you come on up?”
Mark was always struck by how much smaller his apartment looked with Decker—who was a broad-shouldered six-foot-four—standing in it. That Decker was wearing shorts didn’t help; his hairy legs cried out for more personal space than Mark’s apartment could offer.
“Hi, Deck,” said Daria, who was still in the kitchen.
“Hey, Daria.”
“How’ve you been?”
“Great. Wow, you look good—whoa!” Decker turned his head. “Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“Know what?” asked Mark as he sat back down at the kitchen table, opposite Daria. Decker remained standing.
“You know, that it was chow time.”
Daria laughed. “Good Lord, Deck. You can’t see anything.”
Lila was still nursing, but Daria had exercised discretion when it came to how she’d arranged things.
“I know, it’s just that I didn’t want to, ah, invade your privacy.”
“You’re not,” said Mark. “Well, actually, you are. Why?”
Decker scratched his close-cropped blond hair and turned to Mark. “Got a call about an hour ago, boss. Didn’t want to bother you, but…shit, I’m sorry. I got some really, really bad news. Larry’s dead.”
3
Daria ran her hand slowly over Lila’s head as she looked at Mark. Then she leaned over across the table and touched his hand. “I’m sorry, hon. I’m sorry.” She’d never liked Larry Bowlan—he’d always treated her like a china doll that he was afraid he might break, while with Mark it was all business and backslaps. So for her, the news of Larry’s death, while unwelcome, was not a cause for grief. But Mark had known Larry for a long, long time. And for Mark, she grieved.
He just sat there, staring through her.
“I took the call from our embassy in Tbilisi,” said Decker. “I wrote down the name of the hospital where he’s at.”
Daria had only been to the Georgian capital twice, and both stays had been brief. But she knew it was a little corner of the world that Mark knew intimately, because it was where he’d gotten his start in the spy business.
Mark shook his head and placed a hand on his forehead.
“How did he die?” asked Daria.
“I think they’re thinking he just had a heart attack or something. They’re doing some tests at the morgue.”
“He passed away at the hospital?”
“No, at the hotel he was staying in. The cleaning lady found him. I mean, Larry was kind of old.”
“Was he on a job?” Daria asked.
Larry Bowlan had been Mark’s very first boss at the CIA. But after Bowlan had retired for good from the Agency seven months ago, he’d come to work for Mark.
“Yeah.”
Daria just nodded. Because Georgia was on friendly terms with the United States and a crucial transit hub for oil that flowed from the Caspian region to the Mediterranean Sea, she was certain that the CIA had their own assets in country that they could have used. She was guessing that the only reason they’d hired Mark’s firm was that the head of the CIA’s Central Eurasia Division—a guy Mark knew well—had wanted to make an end run around the bureaucracy. And the only reason for making an end run around the bureaucracy would be if the job was kind of sketchy. She didn’t need, or particularly want, to know more.
“The other thing,” said Decker, “is that Larry had already finished the job and filed a preliminary report. So I don’t know what the point of anyone killing him would be.”
“He liked his booze,” said Mark. Larry had only been seventy-two, but he’d looked older.
“That he did,” agreed Daria. Bowlan, she gathered, had been something of a bon vivant in his younger years.
“Was there alcohol in the hotel room?” asked Mark. “Did he just drink himself to death?”
“I don’t know,” said Decker. “But this is the deal. Regardless of how or why he died, we can’t just leave him there. I mean, I suppose we can, but…”
“No,” said Mark. “He’s got a mother who’s…” He sighed, and ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t believe this. He’s got a mother who’s in her nineties who he still calls every week. And a brother he sees every once in a while. We can’t just leave him there.”
“No mother should ever have to outlive her child,” said Daria.
“We’ve got to call his family,” said Mark. “Arrange for the body to be transported back, all that crap. Do this right. Damn.”
Damn is right, thought Daria. Because she knew who Mark meant when he said we.
“Go,” said Daria. “You’ve already arranged to take time off anyway. It’ll be easy.”
Larry had been Mark’s friend and employee. On top of that, now that Larry was gone, she was pretty sure Mark was the only person at his firm who spoke even a little Georgian. She hated the thought of him leaving, but knew that he wouldn’t feel right dumping this on one of his other employees, even Decker.
“That’s not why I took the time off,” said Mark.
He was a good man, thought Daria. Instead of running away when learning she was pregnant, he’d proposed. True, the jarringly quick civil marriage ceremony at the embassy had been less than romantic—but that had been as much her doing as his. He was forty-six, she thirty-four. They’d both spent the better part of their lives operating in the shadows.
She hadn’t wanted a fancy ceremony, wouldn’t have known whom to invite, or where to have it. But she had wanted a honeymoon, to spend time with him, and their two-week postwedding trip to Tuscany had been absolutely lovely. Then for the delivery, he’d been right there with her, holding her hand. He’d helped prepare her first sitz bath, had brought home-cooked food into the hospital, and hadn’t complained once about taking shifts with the baby in the middle of the night. She’d cherished this past week. They’d felt like a family, a real family, not just two battered ex-spies trying to atone—at least in her case, Mark wasn’t the atoning type—for past misdeeds.
“I know it’s not why you took the time off,” Darla said. “But things happen. I understand.”
“Damn.”
Despite her words, she didn’t want him to go. Not now. She’d accepted that Mark wasn’t cut out to lead a normal life, and that trying to change him would be futile. He’d tried to change himself a few years ago, had tried to quit the intelligence game and teach international relations—and it hadn’t gone well; his ties to underworlds in which he’d operated for the better part of his life had proved to be too strong to sever. She’d made her peace with that, and was even proud of him—there was no doubt, he was a hell of a spy. But now was their time to be a family. They’d both arranged to be off for a full two weeks after coming home from the hospital, and after that they were both going to ease back into work, sharing responsibility for Lila.
It would eat away at him if he d
idn’t do what he thought was right by Larry, though. Even if she were able to prevail upon him to stay in Bishkek, his mind would be elsewhere. He’d feel like he was letting down a friend; she didn’t want to be responsible for that.
“We’ll be fine here. We’ve got plenty of supplies, and I can sleep when she sleeps.” Daria mustered a smile and kissed the top of Lila’s head. She loved the feel of her daughter’s hair.
“She’s only a baby once.”
“She’ll still be a baby when you get back.”
“I can go if you want,” said Decker. “But I don’t know that I can run the rest of the business from the road.”
“I’ll go,” said Mark. “I have to. I owe it to Larry.”
Part Two
4
Tbilisi, Georgia
One day later
“Mark Sava?”
“The same.”
“Jim Keal. From the embassy.”
Mark pointedly glanced at his phone. It was ten twenty-five in the morning; he and Keal had agreed to meet at ten. Leaving Daria and Lila to deal with the remains of an old friend was one thing; staying in Tbilisi a second longer than necessary just so some guy he didn’t know could have a second coffee with breakfast was another entirely.
“Sorry I’m late,” added Keal, extending his hand. “Welcome to Tbilisi.”
He was about Mark’s height and age—a little under six feet, mid-forties—but carried an extra hundred pounds on his frame. His face was freckled, his nose slightly upturned, and his brown hair had a reddish tint to it.
“Thanks.” Mark shifted the leather satchel he carried on his shoulder so that he could shake Keal’s hand. It had been just over twenty-four hours since Decker had told him about Larry. He’d left Bishkek on a red-eye that had landed in Tbilisi just before dawn.
“So, ever been here before?” Keal asked brightly.
“Yeah.”
“Really, when would that be?”
Mark didn’t like to be rude, but he liked making small talk even less. He wanted to take care of this business with Larry as quickly as possible. “Can we just do this?”
“Sure, sure, let’s do it.”
They were in old Tbilisi, where a hodgepodge of ruined and rebuilt medieval churches, sagging latticed 19th-century balconies, subterranean beehive-domed bath houses, twisting cobbled alleys, and architectural anomalies—a puppet theater built like a ramshackle gingerbread house, a peculiar minaret rising above a solitary mosque—hinted at a history marked by equal parts chaos and creativity.
Amidst all this sat the Dachi, a four-story, twenty-room boutique hotel with a baroque-inspired exterior and an interior that had been completely gutted and rebuilt as part of a wave of government-funded gentrification that was rapidly improving—or destroying, depending on one’s perspective—old Tbilisi.
The Dachi was where Larry Bowlan had died.
Keal, leading Mark inside, said, “I was talking to the coroner, that’s why I was late. Anyway, that blood test they do, where they check for enzymes—you know, that get released if you have a heart attack? Well, they did that test and it came back positive.”
“I see.”
“I figure after you grab his stuff, we can go over the logistics of transporting his remains.”
“His room is on the third floor,” said the receptionist, a petite Georgian woman with sad eyes and overplucked eyebrows, after checking Keal’s identification and matching it to a name on her computer screen. “But first there is the issue of the room charge.”
Her English was clear but heavily accented.
Turning to Mark, Keal said, “They wanted to clear the room and put his things in storage. But I thought it better to leave it all—”
“It’s OK.”
“It seemed disrespectful to have someone who didn’t know him just throw his things into a suitcase, and…since I knew you were coming in a day…”
“It won’t be a problem.” Mark produced a credit card.
The receptionist prepared the bill, charged Mark’s card, then called for the manager. “He’ll bring you up to the room.”
A tiny glass elevator shot up through the center of a wide spiral staircase. Mark was headed for the stairs, thinking they would be faster, but the manager—a stooped man of perhaps seventy years—pushed the elevator button.
Although it appeared to have been designed to accommodate two, all three of them crowded inside when the doors opened.
“Did you know the deceased well?” Keal asked.
“Yeah.”
“Ah, tough one then, coming here. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Mark pursed his lips—however heartfelt, that phrase always struck him as inadequate. Also, he hadn’t really been thinking of Larry that much, other than to consider that his friend’s death had proved to be a major inconvenience. So it felt a little phony to accept sympathy. “Thank you,” he said.
The elevator was small enough that everyone was brushing up against each other. Out of habit, Mark kept his hands near his pockets and maintained situational awareness; a casual physical connection could be a feint for a pickpocket attempt, or a knife in the side.
Keal turned his head aside and coughed. “You must have had some friends high up in Washington, huh?”
“I don’t know about that.”
Keal coughed again; this time Mark could feel the force of it on the back of his neck. He refrained from breathing for a moment.
“At first, this was treated just like any other death of a citizen abroad. It happens from time to time, just part of life, you know? But then we got the cable from Washington that you’d be coming, and we were to do whatever we needed to accommodate you. Must be nice.”
Mark didn’t respond. Larry had been carrying a US passport when he died—albeit not his real one; that was why the Dachi had called the US embassy after they’d found him dead. The embassy had then called the number of the wine exporting company listed on Larry’s business cards—which was really just one of many numbers Mark used to backstop his operative’s aliases. Mark, in turn, had called Ted Kaufman, who was the chief of the CIA’s Central Eurasia Division.
Kaufman had been the one to make sure Mark wouldn’t be given any hassles, but Mark didn’t want to tell Keal that.
The elevator door opened. Everyone stepped out. The manager led them to a room at the end of the hall and inserted an electronic key into the lock.
Mark stepped inside.
In a small sitting area, a wall-mounted flat-screen television had been positioned opposite a love seat. Relatively new beige carpet covered half the floor; the other half was tiled. Insipid photographic reproductions of oil paintings depicting romanticized scenes from medieval Tbilisi hung from the walls. To the side was a bathroom with a glass-walled shower. Only the high ceilings, framed with egg-and-dart crown molding, hinted at the real age of the building. A room service menu lay on an end table. Morning light spilled in from a partially open casement window.
It smelled of urine. Mark eyed the bed. It was unmade. “Where’d they find him?” he asked.
“On the tile floor, I gather. Outside the bathroom.”
Larry’s things were scattered around the room: a suitcase sat on a folding luggage rack; a sport coat, dress pants, and a collection of ties hung in an open armoire; his toiletry kit hung from a hook in the bathroom; his small laptop computer and camera sat on a small desk in front of the casement window.
Through the window, Mark could hear church bells, reminding him that it was Sunday morning.
Tbilisi was a city of memories for Mark, not all of them good. But one thing he’d always liked was the church bells. They’d sounded strange to his ear whenever he’d come up from Muslim Azerbaijan, where he’d lived for years and which lay just south of Georgia. Though not religious himself, he appreciated the tenacity that those bells represented. For over fifteen hundred years the Georgian Orthodox Church had survived, despite invasions from Islamist Arabs, Turks, and Persians, and the
n the atheist Soviets. The bells said we’re survivors, we outlasted you all, we’re still here.
Keal turned to the manager. Speaking Georgian, he said, “You may leave us. My friend here, he knew the deceased and may need some time to grieve. If we need further assistance we’ll call the reception desk.”
Rehearsing the words in his head before he spoke, Mark said, in barely passable Georgian, “I will only be a few minutes.”
He turned from the window. The scene in the hotel room looked depressingly normal. Larry had worked for the CIA for over forty years; he’d run his own stations in Belarus and Moldova, and later had helped Mark conduct risky operations in Dubai and Bahrain. His life had been too colorful for him to die quietly of a heart attack in some unremarkable hotel room. Mark thought his friend should have passed out at a blackjack table in Monte Carlo, or while sipping vodka at a resort on the Black Sea, or in front of a firing squad in the bowels of some prison in the Middle East.
The first thing Mark inspected was Larry’s $2700 compact digital Sony camera—it looked like something a tourist might carry in his pocket, but took exceptionally high resolution photos. An 8-gigabyte SD memory card had been inserted into the memory slot; Mark removed it, then retrieved a black 128-gigabyte SDXC memory card that had been hidden in the false bottom of a small box of Band-Aids in Larry’s toiletry kit. He inserted it into the camera, then quickly clicked through photos of a Russian military base. As he did so, he looked for gaps in the numbers assigned to each photo—gaps which might indicate that some had been selectively deleted.
There were none.
He powered up Larry’s laptop computer, typed in the password, located a hidden file folder, entered another password, then clicked quickly through a series of still photos; they appeared to be exactly the same as the photos on the SDXC card.
The laptop—a small but powerful Lenovo—had also been programmed to wirelessly back up key files online. Mark would check those files against the files on the memory card and the laptop hard drive later. He snapped the laptop shut and slid it, along with the SDXC card and the camera, into his satchel.
