by Dan Mayland
Mark had read enough briefings on the Middle East over the years to know that Saeed was grossly oversimplifying the matter. Iranians and Egyptians were plenty patriotic. And the urban young in the Middle East seemed to care a great deal more about getting a decent job than they did about upholding ancient notions of tribal fidelity.
But it was true enough that the ruling families of many Persian Gulf states were still influenced by tribal values that prized familial bonds above many Western notions of right and wrong. Nepotism here wasn’t a sign of corruption—it was a sign of commitment to family.
Saeed continued, “I don’t think you understand that. I don’t think you understand how arrogant you appear when you meet with this boy’s uncle, and you listen to him state that he has been responsible for the care of the boy and that he wishes to continue to care for the boy, and instead of making arrangements to give the boy to him, you question his sincerity. It is not your place to question.”
“I didn’t question his sincerity.”
Saeed clicked his tongue as he shook his head. “Then what were you doing in Al Jasra earlier today?” When Mark didn’t answer, Saeed said, “This need to meddle, this lack of respect, is the same kind of thinking that leads America to think it can force democracy on people who want nothing to do with it. If you truly understood Bahrain, you would not think you had any right to decide what is best for a child like Muhammad. You would understand that this is a matter for the boy’s family and his tribe to decide. Not you.”
“He’s got a pretty big family as I understand it.”
“Any member of which is far more entitled than you are to decide what to do with him.”
“See, the problem here—”
Raising his voice, Saeed broke in, “The problem is that you continue to put what you think is right for the boy above what I am telling you is right.”
“Here’s the thing, Saeed. When your men showed up at that orphanage in Kyrgyzstan, they didn’t come with a nice explanation like the one you’ve offered to me. Instead they lied, and then tried to take Muhammad by force. My girlfriend helps run that orphanage. And when your men crossed her, they crossed my tribe.”
“A girlfriend is not a tribe, Mr. Sava.”
“It’s a small tribe, I’ll give you that.”
Daria and Decker, thought Mark. That was pretty much the extent of it. And though the CIA’s Central Eurasia Division was a tribe of its own, they were definitely an ally he’d at least consider fighting for.
“Americans don’t have tribes. They have America.”
Not so, thought Mark. “I don’t need a lecture, Saeed. I just need the truth.”
“Mr. Sava, I’m not a man who takes pleasure in threatening a fellow intelligence officer.”
“Then by all means, don’t.”
“But you leave me no choice—I warn you, the consequences of your intransigence will be grave. And I strongly urge you to consider the fact that this is not your battle to fight.”
“Who is Kalila Safi? And why have people been lying to me about her?”
“Is that your answer?”
Saeed leaned back. His big knees stuck out on either side of his chair.
“I suppose it is.”
“You disappoint me.”
“I disappoint a lot of people.”
Saeed sighed, then glanced behind him and nodded. Three men appeared from opposite corners of the restaurant. One of the men was the older Saudi Mark had clashed with in Kyrgyzstan. He smiled at Mark and opened his sport coat just enough to reveal a shoulder-holstered 9mm Heckler and Koch P7.
“You will go with these men,” said Saeed. “If you resist you will be shot. They will show you something. When they do, remember that I warned you, Marko. I warned you.”
“What did you call me?”
43
Mark was loaded back into the blue Chevy, which looked out of place next to all the Lexus and BMW 7 Series sedans also parked in front of the golf club entrance.
So this is where it starts, he thought. The blackmail, the manipulation, the coercion. Mark didn’t blame Saeed for playing it that way. He blamed himself for not having seen it coming. For letting himself be blindsided like this.
Marko.
The use of his birth name meant they’d broken his cover, the identity he’d painstakingly crafted, had meticulously backstopped bit by bit over the past twenty years.
But how?
The answer, once he thought about it, was obvious—his personnel file had been violated. There was no other way.
And who might have violated his personnel file?
Rosten.
The call about Kalila Safi must have spooked him. So he’d cut a deal with the Saudis, figured he’d get them to do his dirty work. Well, if Rosten thought he could violate highly classified records with impunity, he was in for a rude awakening, thought Mark. No matter what happened with Muhammad, Rosten had crossed a line that should not have been crossed.
As they drove south, deeper into the desert, the older Saudi sat next to Mark in the back seat, pistol drawn. The car smelled like man sweat.
The sky was a hazy gray and the land a dull brown. In the vast flatlands that extended out from either side of the road, enormous excavators were loading sand into dump trucks; other trucks sent trails of dust in the air as they transported the sand to an industrial complex.
He saw an exit sign for Isa Air Base—home of the Bahraini Air Force—and wondered if that was where they were taking him. But they passed the exit without turning off.
Oil fields appeared. Chain-link fences encircled nodding-donkey pumps that were connected to each other by tangles of pipeline. Flare stacks—tall chimneys that burned wasted natural gas—dotted the landscape. The fires at the tops of the towers shimmered in the midday sun. Random pieces of discarded industrial equipment lay baking in the sand.
They pulled off on a little dirt road and drove for maybe a mile, until they came to a crater-like depression in the sand. It looked to Mark like an abandoned excavation site.
“Get out,” said one of the Saudis.
Mark did what he was told.
“Walk down.”
Mark did so. They’re not going to shoot you, he told himself. Not while you still have Muhammad. But do you? Had they found Decker? Saeed had said there was someone he needed to meet. Was that someone Decker? By now it had to be around one in the afternoon, which would make it four in the afternoon Kyrgyzstan time. He tried to imagine what Decker and Daria and Muhammad were doing but drew a blank.
“Sit.”
Mark sat down on the warm sand in the center of the crater. The men guarding him took turns rotating in and out of their air-conditioned car, listening to bad Arabic pop music, drinking cans of some local soda, and telling jokes. Occasionally, one of them would piss near the lip of the depression.
Mark spent most of the time with his head down, facing away from the sun. It was hot, but not oppressively so. Though he speculated about what they planned to do to him, he primarily thought about what he planned to do to Rosten. He considered trying to escape but ruled it out—both because he doubted he could pull it off and because he was curious about how they intended to try to manipulate him.
Marko.
That had been a warning.
For a while, he thought about the Chinese restaurant in Bishkek and his narde buddies. He wished he was back there with them now, tucked away in a dark corner of the restaurant, drinking beer and listening to the narde pieces smacking against the wood playing board. Once or twice he even drifted off to sleep; when he did, he dreamed of Daria.
But always when he woke, he came back to that name. Marko. And to the reason he no longer used it.
Elizabeth, New Jersey, 1985
At three thirty in the afternoon, on the fourteenth of April, the bell announcing the end of the school day rang at Elizabeth High. Knowing he had only ten minutes before he needed to begin work at his father’s gas station, Marko Saveljic darted thro
ugh the crush of students, hurrying to exit the building. His diligence paid off; just five minutes later, he’d reached his home on Coventry Avenue, which left him plenty of time to change into his work clothes and walk down to the gas station.
Marko pushed open the gate in the chain-link fence that stood outside his home and climbed the pitted concrete steps to the front door. A blue Maxwell coffee can, nearly full of cigarette butts, sat to the left of the door. Mounted at chest height above the coffee can, was a rusted black mailbox. His mother, he noticed, had neglected to retrieve the mail.
That was his first clue that something was wrong. The second was the silence.
Marko had two younger brothers, one of whom was five, the other three. They should have been home from preschool by now, he knew. But when the boys were home, they made noise, and lots of it; noise that was easy to hear, even from the street, because the Saveljics’ narrow row house had thin walls and drafty windows. Marko looked all the way down Coventry Avenue, to the gas station on the corner. He could just make out his dad, fueling up a Plymouth Volaré station wagon at one of the pumps.
That much, at least, was normal.
Maybe the mail had just come late today, he thought, as he pulled a Sears catalogue and an electric bill out of the mailbox. But when he looked at the neighbors’ mailboxes—all the way down the row of connected houses, he saw that the mail had already been taken in. So it couldn’t have come that late.
Marko opened the front door and stepped into the cramped living room.
“Hello?”
No one answered. As he studied the room, he didn’t like what he saw.
On a mahogany table to his left was the phone. An answering machine connected to the phone was blinking rapidly, indicating that several messages were waiting to be listened to.
The door to the basement was open. At that moment, he knew.
“Hello?” called Marko. “Mom?”
The house sounded empty. It felt empty. He wanted to be wrong.
He looked at the basement door again, then turned away.
The long lace curtains in the living room were drawn. The dark maroon walls had been rendered darker still by a sickly film of cigarette smoke residue. A staircase with chunky oak balusters led to the second floor. Pictures of Marko, his younger brothers, and his older sister lined the wall that led to the second floor. There were school photos, baptism photos, a few from the Jersey shore… Marko recalled that his mother had personally framed and hung every one of them.
No, he thought. He had to be wrong. But he couldn’t block out the memory of the fighting from the night before. His mother in tears, accusing his father.
Opposite the staircase, on the other side of the living room, his father’s prized icons—Eastern Orthodox religious paintings—decorated the walls. Two-dimensional and stiff, they made Marko think of the Dark Ages. Jesus with his halo, John the Baptist holding a tri-bar cross… His father’s parents had brought the paintings with them when they had emigrated from Serbia. The paintings had been passed on to Marko’s father when they’d died.
The open door to the basement beckoned him. He took a step toward it. The light in the basement was on.
“Mom!”
The steps creaked as Marko descended them.
Laundry lines, sagging with the weight of wet clothes, crisscrossed the basement, and Marko detected the pleasant smell of detergent and bleach. Recognizing many of his own clothes, he wondered whether that had been intentional—whether she’d made a point of doing one last thing for him.
She’d hung the jury-rigged noose from a floor joist right in front of the staircase. The chair she’d stood on lay kicked to the side. Her bare feet dangled inches from the floor, her tongue was—
Marko turned away.
What she hadn’t intended was that he would be the one to find her. Of that he was certain. His father was supposed to have been the one to walk down these steps. On his lunch break.
He considered cutting her down and calling for an ambulance. Maybe she wasn’t really dead yet.
He forced himself to take another look. No, she was long past saving.
Unable to think, speak, or cry, he fell back onto the steps. All he wanted to do was run. But he couldn’t even force himself to do that. Eventually his thoughts turned to his brothers. And that’s when he understood what the blinking light on the answering machine was all about.
He stood, walked back up the stairs, and pushed play on the machine. As he expected, it was the secretary from the local preschool. No one had come to pick up his brothers. The boys were at the office, but the office would be closing soon. Someone needed to come get them.
Marko considered picking up his brothers himself. But would the school even release them to him? He was only seventeen, a brother not a parent… and if they did, where would he bring them? Not here, that much was certain.
He should call the cops.
No. His father could deal with that.
He felt for his wallet in his back pocket. It was still there. Inside was his brand-new driver’s license and twelve dollars. That would have to do.
The walk down to his father’s gas station on the corner only took a couple of minutes. It was a dismal place. The neon sign on the corner said SAVE-A-LOT, only the L was dark. The pumps were all at least twenty years old. His dad still owed the previous owner lots of money, which meant money was tight in the Saveljic household. Too tight. That had been part of the problem.
As Marko approached, he saw that his father was cleaning the windshield of an orange Dodge Duster, behind the wheel of which sat an old biddy of a woman. A clock on top of one of the pumps read 3:44. Marko was supposed to have shown up for work four minutes ago. For years now, pumping gas at his father’s station had been his sole after-school activity.
“You’re late.” His father had broad shoulders, deep-set eyes, a hard jaw, and hair that was cut tight to his scalp. His voice was menacing and accusing. Tiny holes riddled his grease-stained work pants, a result of battery acid splatter.
“Why didn’t you go home for lunch today?” Marko asked.
Marko’s father finished cleaning the windshield and put his squeegee back into a bucket next to the gas pump. “How do you know I didn’t?”
“I just know.”
Marko’s father looked puzzled. “One of the pumps broke. Had to wait for a part from Romano’s. Why don’t you have your coveralls on? You show up late and you’re not even dressed for work?”
He positioned himself so that the old lady in the Duster couldn’t see him and gave Marko an unfriendly push on the shoulder.
He’d smothered her, thought Marko. He’d kept her in that dark cave of a home and had done little over the years but criticize the few friends she’d dared to make, criticize her hair, her weight, her mothering abilities, what he perceived to be her lack of faith…
Marko’s mother had come to the United States from Soviet Georgia when she was five. English had been her second language, and her timidity with the new tongue had spilled over into the rest of her life. His father had taken advantage of that timidity. He’d taken a gentle, kind, beautiful woman and turned her into a lost soul, starved for love.
And then he’d cheated on her. Marko had gleaned that much from their argument the night before. It seemed that his father had been having an affair with a woman from the Orthodox church, a young widow he’d supposedly been counseling.
“Mom’s waiting for you back at the house.”
“Eh?”
“She’s in the basement. She has something she wants to tell you.”
“Now?”
“Yeah, now.”
“Dammit, Marko! We’ve got work to do.”
“I’m quitting.”
A moment passed. Marko sensed a blow might be coming, but he just stared at his father, not backing down. Though they were about the same height, Marko didn’t yet possess his father’s strength.
“I don’t have time for this, Marko.”
“By the way, don’t forget about the boys. Someone needs to pick them up from school.”
“No one’s picked them up?”
“No. Mom can explain it. Like I said, she’s got something to tell you.”
Marko turned and began to walk away.
“Marko! Get back here! You gotta watch the pumps while I talk to your mom!”
Marko broke into a run. His father, he decided, was as dead to him as his mother was. From this day forward, as far as he was concerned, he was an orphan.
“Hey!”
Mark heard the voice, but was too absorbed in his thoughts at first to respond.
“Hey! Get up here. We’re leaving.”
Mark opened his eyes. He looked at the sun, and guessed it was around five in the afternoon, which would mean he’d been in the desert for four hours. He stood up slowly and stiffly, then walked back up the embankment to his abductors.
They returned to the main road they’d been on earlier and continued south. But they hadn’t been going long before they turned down a dirt road and pulled up to a little maintenance shack that sat near a cluster of oil pumps.
“Get out,” the driver ordered in English.
In case Mark hadn’t gotten the message, the older Saudi gestured to the door with his gun. Mark stepped out of the car.
44
Rad Saveljic was hungry, thirsty, panicked, lonely, lightheaded, and deeply depressed. On top of all that, his right leg was killing him. He couldn’t put any weight on it; hell, he couldn’t even touch it without flinching. It throbbed like a second heart down by his shinbone.
What had happened? And why had it happened to him? Where was he? How much time had passed? Was it about a ransom? Had someone contacted his boss, or his dad back in New Jersey, asking for money?
But these guys hadn’t said anything about money. They hadn’t said anything about anything. They’d just blindfolded him, stuffed him into a car, bundled him onto a plane, and then brought him to… Rad didn’t even know where he was.
