Death of a Spy

by Dan Mayland

  Mark felt the barrel of the pistol lift off the base of his skull.

  Titov said, “Now do you remember who I am?”

  47

  Tbilisi, Georgia

  June 1991, six months before the dissolution of the Soviet Union

  Marko Saveljic had never used heroin of any kind before, hadn’t even smoked it, but he’d seen enough doped-up vagrants on the streets of his hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to know that it was possible to take the drug in doses that left one reasonably functional.

  But the KGB thugs who’d kidnapped him, just hours after he’d discovered the listening device in Katerina’s art bag, clearly hadn’t been aiming for him to remain functional. After an initial interrogation and beating, the results of which evidently hadn’t been satisfactory because it had been followed by a second interrogation and beating, they’d spent weeks—two? three? Marko had lost all track of time, but a glance at all the needle marks on his arm told him that it had been awhile—injecting as much heroin in him as his body could take, as often as his body could take it. Sometimes the initial rush of the drug had been so strong that he’d started choking before floating down into that warm painless netherworld…

  But the night before, the injections had abruptly stopped.

  When he’d been high they hadn’t bothered to beat him. Perhaps because it was pointless to inject someone with a powerful painkiller and then try to inflict pain. But now he knew that, while he felt no pain when high on heroin, the pain was magnified tenfold when coming off it.

  When they started interrogating him again, he tried to answer their questions, he really did, but the problem was he had no good answers. So they beat him again, and again, sometimes with a rubber truncheon, sometimes with their fists.

  He told them now as he had before all about his meetings with the American named Larry, and about funneling money to the Press Club, he told them everything he could remember, every little detail, but that wasn’t enough. They were convinced he actually worked for the CIA, that he knew more.

  He even tried to make up things about the CIA, to tell them what they wanted to hear, but he didn’t know enough about the CIA to make his lies believable.

  They gave him breakfast—water and stale salted crackers—but he threw everything up as a jaw-rattling fever and intense stomach cramps came upon him. He felt like he needed to shit, but his body hurt all over, hurt too much to squat over the bucket that sat by his head and which was already full with his excrement.

  He moved his cheek a few inches, so that it lay on a new, cooler patch of concrete. Maybe they were done with him. Maybe they’d finally realized that he had nothing left to tell them.

  A door opened. Light spilled in. Someone kicked him.

  “Get up.” This in Russian.

  Marko couldn’t get up.

  A hand clasped his hair, yanked him to a kneeling position, and pulled him in the direction of the door.

  Outside, four men wearing black ski masks stood around a fifth who was kneeling in the dirt, face uncovered, arms handcuffed behind his back. All the men with the ski masks were armed.

  “I want them facing each other,” said the man who, even with the ski mask on, Marko recognized as the leader. He recognized the blue eyes, and the slope of the muscular shoulders, and the pattern of scuff marks on his black boots.

  Someone pulled Marko a few more feet forward, until he was facing a young man with shoulder-length brown hair, swollen lips, and teary, bruised brown eyes.

  The leader gave Marko a sharp kick in the thigh. “You have been unhelpful. This is what we do to bitches that are unhelpful.” He removed a black semiautomatic pistol from an exposed shoulder holster, aimed it at the back of the head of the unnamed prisoner, and in Russian said, “This is the end of your time on this earth. No God will save you.” The prisoner began to shake. “Your pleas for mercy will go unanswered. After you die, and your blood stains the earth, you will be buried in a trash heap. No one will mourn you, no one will care.”

  And then, just like that, the trigger was pulled. The bullet traveled through the back of the prisoner’s head, out the front of his nose, and into the dirt between Marko’s knees. As the prisoner slumped forward into Marko, he drooled blood on Marko’s shoulder.

  “OK, now it’s your turn,” said the leader to Marko. “Are you prepared?”

  The strange thing, thought Marko, was that, yes, he was prepared. He was so tired, and in so much pain, that he was ready for it all to end.

  48

  Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan

  The present day

  “You,” said Mark, now recognizing the eyes, and the voice—even the slope of the shoulders—of the man who’d tortured him all those years ago. He’d never known the Russian’s name. He did now.

  Titov.

  Mark had been sure he was going to die that day, but instead he’d just heard the click of a firing pin descending on an empty chamber. In the weeks that followed, the Russians had executed five more men in front of him, some old, one even younger than the first had been. His captors—whose names Mark had never known—hadn’t told him where the men had come from, or why they were being executed. Mark had hoped they were criminals who’d been given the death penalty, and that the Russians had just been carrying out executions that would have occurred anyway, but he’d never known for sure.

  Titov had gone back to sitting on the bed. “So all that time, you were lying. You were working for the CIA. As you are working for them—or with them—now. Don’t try to deny it. I know about your operation in Bishkek, about your Navy SEAL friend, the work you do for the CIA there. I’ll know even more soon.”

  As Mark stared at Titov, horrified to be face to face with him again and to hear him mention the city where his wife and daughter resided, he recalled that his imprisonment in Georgia had taught him an important lesson—that the only way to avoid being completely controlled by monsters was to stop caring about what they might do to you. He’d gotten to that point in Georgia, when he’d accepted—and even welcomed—his own death, and he’d carried that feeling with him throughout much of his career with the CIA. It was at the very heart of what had made him a good CIA officer.

  With Lila in the picture, though, he’d changed. Even if his own life wasn’t worth worrying about, his daughter’s certainly was, and her fate was tied in some small way to his own. He couldn’t provide for her and protect her if he was dead.

  At least that’s what he’d been telling himself—until now. With Titov standing in front of him, bragging about how he’d been poking his nose around Bishkek, Mark felt a nearly overwhelming urge to rip the Russian’s throat out, consequences be damned.

  Mark eyed Titov for a moment, then said, “When I was a student in Tbilisi, I was helping Larry Bowlan, and Bowlan was working for the CIA. I knew nothing about operations outside of the one I was involved in. I told you everything I knew back then, but you were too stupid to realize I was telling the truth.”

  The insult didn’t appear to affect Titov. “You came back to Georgia within two years of leaving. You were spotted in Abkhazia.”

  “By then I was working with the CIA. But when you knew me I was just being used by the CIA, by Bowlan.”

  “After we kidnapped you, Bowlan searched for you. He sent men to rescue you. He wouldn’t have done that if you were just someone he was using.”

  “He did.” Bowlan had leveraged his connections to Georgian rebels to put together a proxy hit squad that had hunted down and decimated the KGB in Tbilisi. All of Mark’s captors had been slaughtered; Titov had only survived because he hadn’t been there at the time.

  Mark and Titov stared at each other for a while.

  Titov asked, “What happened to you, after you escaped?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Mark didn’t understand why they were talking about his distant past instead of the secret military zone in Nakhchivan, or the buildup of Russian forces in the region, or why Titov had killed Larry Bowlan fiv
e days ago. And he still didn’t understand what any of this had to do with Katerina. There were too many questions.

  Titov didn’t answer.

  Mark asked, “Why do you care about all this ancient history?” The two men stared at each other for a while, then Mark said, “I went back to the United States, kicked the heroin, and joined the CIA. Larry Bowlan recommended me, made sure I was taken care of.”

  “I mean before that, after Bowlan rescued you, but when you were still in Georgia.”

  “Nothing. I just left Georgia.”

  “You are so full of lies, Sava.”

  “I didn’t finish my Fulbright, I didn’t do anything.”

  “You just left.” Titov words were undergirded with sarcasm.

  “The people who freed me—”

  “You mean the people who killed my men.”

  “—dropped me off on the streets of Tbilisi. I tried to go back to my apartment, but I’d been away for over two months and it had been cleaned out and re-rented. You know what I looked like, you know what you did to me. I could barely stand. I was going through withdrawal. I needed a fix but I didn’t have the slightest idea where to get one. So I sat outside the door to my old apartment and just…did nothing. The landlady tried to get me to leave, even threatened to call the cops. Your men got to her, I know, that’s why she would barely look at me. I told her I’d leave, but only if she let me use her phone. I tried to call Katerina, but I couldn’t get through to her. I walked out onto the street—Katerina’s apartment was over a mile away, and I didn’t think I could make it there, but I was going to try, and that’s when Larry Bowlan picked me up.”

  49

  Titov found it impossible to gauge whether Sava was lying or not. Even as a twenty-two-year-old, Sava had been difficult to read, and his stories had always shifted. Though he might not have been a spy at that point, he’d certainly acted like one. If the kid had just broken down and pled for mercy, the interrogation might not have gone on for as long as it had. But Titov had always sensed that Sava had been keeping something in reserve, even if it had just been his dignity. He’d been determined to completely break the kid, to strip him of everything, but he hadn’t been able to do it. Sava had held on. He’d been barely conscious half the time, but had still found the energy to spit—literally and figuratively—in people’s faces.

  “What happened after Larry Bowlan picked you up?”

  Sava’s eyes looked dead. His mouth formed neither a smile nor a frown. “Of course, as you know, I was addicted to heroin.”

  Titov didn’t bother responding. He had many regrets, but what he’d done to Sava wasn’t one of them. After Sava had been set free, and the KGB in Tbilisi left reeling as a result of Bowlan’s death squad, Titov had been demoted to protection duty in Chechnya. Those had been bleak days, and they had become bleaker still when the Soviet Union collapsed. The very existence of the KGB had been called into question, and it had taken many long years for both Titov and the KGB to rise again.

  Sava said, “Bowlan took me to a house. In the countryside. He helped clean me up. He fed me. Got me some heroin too, not much, but enough so that I wouldn’t experience any more withdrawal symptoms while still in Georgia. The idea was that he’d patch me up just enough so that I’d be let on a civilian plane. And that’s what happened. A few days after getting to the safe house, I was driven to the airport. Someone from the embassy accompanied me. I was still a wreck, but at least I could walk. The story was I got mugged in Tbilisi. Anyway, I made it home. Kicked the heroin addiction first, then got a call from Bowlan asking whether I wanted to join the CIA.”

  “And you said you did?”

  “It would appear so.”

  “And you never tried to talk to Katerina again?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It was safer that way.”

  “You said you tried to call her right after you got back to Tbilisi.”

  “I did.”

  “What changed?”

  “I had time to think about it. Time to realize that maybe she’d be safer if I stayed away from her. I didn’t want you doing to her what you did to me.”

  “What makes you think we would have hurt Katerina?”

  “You used her, didn’t you? You and your men planted a listening device on her to get to me.”

  It seemed surreal to Mark that they were having this conversation about something that had happened such a long, long time ago, so long ago that it hardly seemed real anymore.

  “We might have.”

  “We both know you did. And I knew that if I didn’t walk away from her you’d try to use her again to get to me. So I let her go.”

  Titov tapped his thigh with his pistol. “Still, not a single call. Not even a note. You must not have thought much of her.”

  “Wrong. I thought I loved her.”

  Titov stared into Mark’s eyes. They were as dead when he spoke of love as when he spoke of torture. Either the American was an exceptionally good liar, or he honestly didn’t know about what had happened.

  “Did Bowlan try to stop you?” asked Titov. “From contacting Katerina?”

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  A silence. Titov wasn’t sure whether Mark was trying to remember or had decided to ignore the question.

  “He might have,” said Mark eventually. “We discussed my predicament, and how best to proceed.”

  “How to proceed.”

  “You’re asking about something that happened over twenty years ago. And you know the condition I was in. My memory of that time is foggy. Why did you kill Larry Bowlan? And what was the painting of Katerina doing in his room?”

  “Ah yes, the painting. Let us talk about it.” Titov’s voice rose a notch. “Because if you really left Georgia when you said you did, without bothering to contact Katerina, you would not have been able to recognize it.”

  “Not true.”

  “The painting does not even show her face, Sava, so you could not have simply recognized her. And I happen to know that this painting, she made it after you were captured! So if you never saw her again after you escaped, then there is no way you would be able to recognize this painting.” Titov let Sava think about that for a moment. “That is how I know you lie. No, what happened is that after you escaped you paid a visit to Katerina. You saw this painting. It was still drying, no? And Sava—I know what you did when you were there.”

  Titov glared at Sava, daring the American to deny the truth.

  The elevator door at the end of the cavern opened. One of Titov’s men appeared. He wore a combat headset and carried a short-barreled automatic rifle. “Sir, we have a problem.”

  Situated on the edge of the badlands ten miles northwest of Nakhchivan City, atop an old salt mine, the Babak Sanatorium was housed in a grand old prewar building that had originally been built to accommodate asthmatic Soviet pensioners seeking refuge from the damp, cold hinterlands of central Russia. More recently, it had been restored by a group of overly optimistic Turkish investors hoping to lure aging pensioners from Turkey and Iran to the restorative air of the mine.

  The venture had failed—it turned out the appeal of traveling to a police state and paying top dollar to sleep in a salt mine was limited—and one month earlier, the FSB had bought the property from a Turkish bank. One week ago, Titov had begun quietly transferring his men and matériel from South Ossetia into Nakhchivan, using the sanatorium as his base.

  Now, upon exiting the elevator that led from the mine to the ground floor of the sanatorium, Titov was greeted by one of his men, a twenty-five-year-old Muscovite who was the son of the FSB’s Saint Petersburg director.

  “How many are there?” asked Titov as he half-walked, half-jogged around a dormant fountain that stood in front of the elevator.

  “Six cars, fourteen men.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Nine have taken positions around the perimeter of the sanatorium, five are at the front
door.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Makarov pistols and a few Uzis. No heavy armor.”

  “What do they want?”

  “To search the premises.”

  Why was this happening? The advance team from FSB counterintelligence had paid off the local police. The sanatorium had no close neighbors; it was surrounded by badlands and desert. Sava. Somehow he’d led the Azeris here. Titov didn’t know how the American had done it, but the fact that they’d shown up so soon after Sava’s arrival wasn’t a coincidence.

  “What have you told them?”

  “We asked if they had a warrant to enter. They said no, but that they intended to enter by means of force if we didn’t allow them entry.”

  “Do you believe them?”

  Titov had reached the front lobby. Though it had been retrofitted with shiny ceramic tile and gaudy chandeliers, there was no furniture, which gave the room an empty, sterile feel. Through the glass doors he saw one of his men arguing with what appeared to be an Azeri police officer.

  Titov ducked into a room off the lobby where ten different LCD monitors hung from walls; each displayed a live CCTV feed from different points around the sanatorium. They confirmed what he’d already been told: the sanatorium was surrounded.

  Titov had confidence in his men; they were highly trained, and the tunnels were filled with arms that—although earmarked for the upcoming operation—could be used now to mount a robust defense. But once the fighting started, the Azeris could call in reinforcements, the army even. The tunnels would be inspected, the weapons would be found. Their cover would be blown.

  Titov grabbed a radio headset, confirmed that the transmitter was set to block intercepts by rapidly changing frequencies, then called out a series of codes. He listened as each of his men responded, then instructed one of them to relay a message to the man who was dealing with the Azeris at the entrance—continue to stall.