The Colonel's Mistake

by Dan Mayland

  “I wasn’t aware.”

  Orkhan sat back and smiled, a hard smile that showed his teeth. Mark caught a glimpse of a gold crown in the back and recalled that the Ministry of National Security was the Azeri equivalent of the old KGB. They even occupied the same building that the KGB had operated out of, and had wound up employing many of the same people—people like Orkhan.

  “Surely you know she and her child share a bedroom at her parents’ house? It is in this bedroom that she smokes. You must get her to stop.”

  Mark shrugged, as though a little bored by the small talk. “You make a good point.”

  Mark had aged well, Orkhan observed with grudging admiration.

  Ten years ago, back when Mark had first been posted to Azerbaijan, he almost certainly would have expressed some pointless and typically American moral outrage at the news that his girlfriend’s bedroom had been violated.

  But not this older version of Mark. This Mark had perfected a look of cruel apathy, a dead-eyed look that reminded Orkhan of Uzbek sex-traffickers and Russian mafia assassins.

  Of course, Orkhan suspected that behind his facade Mark was just as stupidly idealistic and dangerously sentimental as he and the rest of his American colleagues had always been. But he respected his counterpart’s evolving ability to hide those weaknesses.

  Mark said, “A prominent American was killed yesterday.”

  Orkhan studied Mark for a moment, then took a long drag on his cigarette and threw a handful of empty pistachio shells onto the burning hill where they crackled as they erupted into flames.

  “Do the Americans blame us?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “They’ll fault our security, although the charges will be baseless.”

  “You already have someone in custody. She’s a translator, does a lot of work with business clients through the hotels. Carries an Iranian passport.”

  “You are still in contact with your government, I see.”

  Orkhan had never believed for a second that Mark was really just teaching in Baku. For the past few years Mark had not only been the CIA’s station chief, but for all practical purposes he’d been the US ambassador too because the actual US ambassador didn’t speak Azeri. Orkhan hadn’t thought the Americans would let an asset like Mark just walk away. The call he’d received last night, informing him that Mark was on his way to Gobustan, had proved him right.

  Mark took a pistachio from the bag on the table, pried open the shell, and popped the nut in his mouth. “I thought you should know that your efforts would be better served if you looked elsewhere.”

  “And this information, it comes from Washington?”

  “No. It comes from me.”

  “Why not from Washington?”

  “You may hear from them soon.”

  “I thought you were retired.”

  “A friend requested my help.”

  “I see.”

  Orkhan sighed as he focused on the fire. The Americans were up to something, that much was obvious. The problem was that the Americans were schizophrenic. Their State Department was pushing for free elections, the Department of Defense for secret bases on the Iranian border, the CIA for better security on the BTC pipeline…Too many people were pushing too many agendas.

  Orkhan felt a migraine coming on. He finished his cigarette, tossed it on the fire, and lit another.

  “She is one of yours, I assume? This is why she is with this man Campbell?”

  He stared at Mark, got the dead-eyed look back. Sometimes he missed the old Mark, he thought.

  “I was led to believe that the American government and the Azeri government had an open relationship,” said Orkhan with more than a little sarcasm. “You wouldn’t have undeclared spies on my soil, would you? Spies using false identification, breaking Azeri laws?”

  “I’m concerned her life may be in danger.”

  “And what gives you cause for such concern?”

  “Intuition.”

  “Intuition? My intuition tells me my men did not watch you close enough when you were playing teacher.”

  “I really did quit.”

  “Then why do you talk to me instead of that fool Logan?”

  “I stayed on in Baku because I was offered a good job here. And the reason Logan’s not talking to you is because he’s dead.”

  “Ahh…” Orkhan nodded his head as he stared into the fire, enjoying the feel of the heat through his light wool suit. The only sound was the sibilant hiss of the flames.

  “I’m asking that you continue not to publicize her capture. It will make it harder for you to release her when she’s cleared.” Mark leaned close to Orkhan as he spoke. “And for now, guard her heavily. With men you trust.”

  “This is a concern for the minister of the interior. Why are you talking to me?”

  “Because I don’t know the minister of the interior. And you do.” Mark paused, then added, “Please.”

  “Please?” Orkhan was genuinely surprised. His relationship with Mark had always been based on mutual self-interest. Azerbaijan needed the Americans to counterbalance the Russians, and the Americans needed his country to have access to Azeri oil, which had been accomplished in the form of a pipeline that led from the Caspian to the Mediterranean. Quid pro quo. Personal appeals were irrelevant at best. At worst they suggested vulnerability.

  Orkhan wondered whether this girl at Gobustan meant more to Mark than he was letting on.

  “If she is the slightest bit harmed while in your custody,” said Mark flatly, “I can assure you my government will want to know why. Having Campbell dead on your soil looks bad enough already. Azerbaijan doesn’t need to be known as an uncontrollable haven for terrorists. It would be bad for business and bad for you.”

  “Now that is the Mark I know. Back to issuing threats, are you?”

  Orkhan was actually relieved. With a CIA station chief and former deputy US secretary of defense dead, the last thing he needed was for Mark—the only American in Azerbaijan he considered even remotely competent—to start acting irrationally just because of some girl.

  “I’m just telling you there’s the potential for more trouble.”

  Orkhan exhaled through his nose and clenched his jaw. “What am I dealing with, Mark?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who would want Campbell dead? And Logan? It certainly wasn’t us.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m here.”

  “The Chinese? The Iranians? The Russians?”

  “All a possibility. The only thing I know for sure is that the woman you’re holding as a suspect didn’t do it.”

  Mark got back to his apartment a little before noon. He figured he still had time to get some work done if he could force himself to concentrate and get back to his real life. He’d done what he could for Daria.

  But within less than a minute of sitting down at his computer, he walked over to a shelf in his living room. Tucked between two granite bookends was a miniature long narde board, a backgammon-like game that was popular in Azerbaijan. He played it via weekly e-mail exchanges with a former agent, a colonel with Russian military intelligence who now lived as a pensioner in Tbilisi.

  Mark picked up the dice, but instead of rolling them, he thought about Daria.

  He remembered when, just two months after her arrival in Baku, she’d approached him about recruiting the counselor for investment affairs at the Iranian embassy. Kaufman had been skeptical, but Daria had pulled the operation off flawlessly. And the information she’d extracted had proved extremely damaging to Iranian business interests in Azerbaijan.

  As station chief he hadn’t been one to play favorites with any of his operations officers. Had he been forced to choose, though, it would have been Daria. She’d been a little green when she’d served under him, but she’d had guts.

  He was finally about to roll the long narde dice when his landline rang. It was Kaufman.

  “I’ll call you right back,” said Mark. He hung up, took out h
is cell phone, popped out the thumbnail-sized SIM card in the back, then replaced it with a new card. His phone now had a new number, one that the Azeris presumably didn’t know about yet.

  “Expect an FBI forensic crew,” said Kaufman, when Mark had reestablished the connection. “They’ll be in Baku as of tomorrow morning and they’ll want to talk to you. Be at the embassy by nine. A legal attaché is flying in from Ankara and meeting with the ambassador tonight.”

  “You call in Logan’s ops officers?”

  “After what happened at the Trudeau House, we have only two left in the station. One is Daria, the second Peters. Daria I’m doing my best on.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning we’re trying to open up a back channel to Aliyev through State.”

  “Then you should know I already talked to Orkhan about her.” Mark gave Kaufman a brief synopsis of his conversation.

  “You had no authority to talk to Orkhan. You could have fucked up what we’re trying to do through State.”

  “Sorry, was just trying to help.”

  “Don’t give me that crap, Sava. I mean it, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that you don’t know about.”

  “Talk to me about Peters.”

  Kaufman was silent for a moment, as if debating whether to let the Orkhan matter drop. “I’m having trouble establishing contact.”

  Mark knew Leonard Peters—while studying international law at Stanford, he’d written a paper on the Iranian courts that had caught the attention of the Agency. So he was smart as hell, but the agents he’d recruited had been second-rate.

  “How have you tried to establish contact?”

  “Phone, embassy courier.”

  “You know where he’s living?”

  “I have him on Sarabski Street.”

  “He also used to keep an empty apartment on Aslanov,” said Mark. “For meeting agents.”

  “See, that’s why I called you, you know these things. Any chance you could swing by?”

  Mark didn’t answer immediately. Instead he stared out at his balcony, where he noticed that his potted tomato plants were wilting. He made a mental note to water them when he got off the phone. They’d been a house gift from Nika and keeping them alive had become a bit of a hobby.

  Kaufman said, “I can have you put on the books as an independent contractor if you like.”

  There were two worlds out there, thought Mark. One was populated by normal people who believed that their lives were governed by natural laws that were knowable and consistent, if sometimes brutal. And then there was an underworld, populated by insane people who believed in no consistent set of laws, or even a consistent reality. When Mark had started with the CIA, he’d been up to his neck in that underworld. He’d even thought it was a more honest place—that the normal world was just a figment of people’s collective imagination—and that by refusing to buy into the fantasy he was mustering the courage to see things the way they really were.

  Now he didn’t care whether the normal world was a fantasy, as long as he had a chance to enjoy it for a while. Which is why he’d quit the Agency.

  Still, Peters could be next on the list. Someone should warn the guy.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said Mark. “But don’t bother putting me on the books. I’m doing you a quick favor and getting Peters off my conscience. Nothing more.”

  “You have a conscience? This is news. By the way, I’ve arranged for a little extra security.”

  “No thanks.” Mark figured that if anyone had wanted him dead because of his ties to the CIA it would have happened already, when his guard was down. And besides, when it came to personnel, he thought Kaufman’s judgment sucked.

  “Not for you,” said Kaufman dismissively, as if the thought of protection for Mark had never ever crossed his mind. “For Peters. I want him under armed guard from the minute you find him.”

  Adidas, Polo, Tommy Hilfiger, Sony…hundreds of Western shops, intermixed with nightclubs and restaurants, lined Nizami Street in downtown Baku. High above, colorful advertising banners fluttered slowly in the waning breeze. The street was blocked off to cars and crowded with shoppers, which was why Mark had thought it would be a good place to meet John Decker, the man Kaufman had contracted to protect Peters.

  He could see Decker’s head now, a hundred feet away, bobbing up and down above the crush of people around him. It was an unusually large head, complemented by a chiseled face and topped with soldier-short dirty-blond hair. For brief moments, when the crowd parted, Mark caught glimpses of Decker’s bright blue short-sleeved shirt, easily spotted in what was otherwise a sea of dour brown and black fabric. Equally conspicuous was the broad smile on Decker’s face.

  People in Azerbaijan smiled plenty—just not while they were walking around by themselves in public.

  Mark couldn’t help but smile briefly himself, thinking this was the CIA he remembered. Former Navy SEAL John Decker would be the perfect person to act as a bodyguard for Peters, assuming Peters never attempted to meet any of his agents, conduct any clandestine work, or do anything that involved blending in with native Azeris. Which was to say Peters wouldn’t be able to do anything that a CIA operations officer investigating Campbell’s death would be required to do.

  Decker approached a line of cabs—mostly old Russian-made Ladas—on Vurgun Street where it intersected with Nizami. He began to look inside each one, eliciting bored looks from the cigarette-smoking drivers who were lounging around next to their vehicles.

  Mark, who was sitting in his Niva behind the line of cabs, tapped on his horn, but Decker didn’t notice. So he drove forward a few feet and rolled down his window.

  “Need a ride?”

  Decker waved him away without making eye contact.

  Mark looked out his windshield for a moment, then said, “Buddy! Get in the damn car.”

  This time Decker turned.

  “I’m your contact,” said Mark quietly.

  Decker’s eyes widened and he gave a significant nod of his chin. He climbed in the Niva, although it was a tight squeeze for him and his head nearly touched the ceiling. He offered his hand to Mark and in a serious, I’m-all-business tone, said, “Pleasure to meet you, sir.”

  Mark ignored Decker’s hand—he needed both of his own to muscle the manual steering. On top of that he was irritable and worried about Peters and Daria.

  He estimated that Decker was in his midtwenties. One more guy out of thousands drawn to Baku by the oil money, looking to cash in on his Navy SEAL experience. Only Mark thought Decker was too late. A decade ago Baku had been like the Wild West during the gold rush. But the big security firms had long-since discovered Baku and taken over.

  “You don’t look like a SEAL. You’re too big.” Six four, Mark guessed. And broad-shouldered. Guys the size of Decker were usually too slow and awkward to handle the training.

  Decker screwed up his face a bit. “Are you always this friendly?”

  “Are you armed?”

  Decker lifted his pant legs, revealing a snub-nosed Glock holstered on one ankle and a five-inch double-bladed combat knife on the other.

  Mark shrugged. “OK, John Decker. You’ll do. Let’s go find your protection detail.”

  Peters’s apartment—the allegedly empty one he kept on Aslanov Street—was locked, but Mark had brought a couple of small lock-picking tools with him.

  “Old-school. That’s pretty slick,” said Decker as Mark went to work. After a few minutes of watching Mark unsuccessfully try to pick the lock, he said, “You know they make electronic picks now. I trained on one a few years ago. They’re great.”

  “That so?” said Mark.

  “Yeah, you just stick it in and it does the work for you.”

  “You got one now?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then what’s your point?”

  “Ah, no point I guess.”

  After another minute the door swung open.

  Mark, for one, wasn’t overly surp
rised at the state in which they found Leonard Peters. Even before discovering the body in the bathtub, he’d noted the scratch marks around the lock. Then there was the overturned ashtray in the living room and Peters’s ridiculous pipe—Mark always suspected Peters had fancied himself a bit of a Sherlock Holmes—broken in two on the living room floor.

  It was a small apartment, but Peters evidently had started living there, for it had been furnished with care—supple leather couches from Turkey, a fancy espresso maker, dark blue curtains…The bed had been made. Other than the few things in the living room and kitchen that appeared to have been disturbed as the result of a struggle, nothing was out of order.

  Mark went back into the bathroom and examined the body. Decker stood behind him, Glock drawn. There were gunshot wounds on Peters’s arms, but also precise shots to his head and chest, reminiscent of the clustering Mark had seen at the Trudeau House. The body rested in a seated position with one arm hanging over the side of the tub, like a modern-day Death of Marat.

  Mark noted the purple livor mortis on the hand outside the tub. He squeezed it gently between his forefinger and thumb. Peters’s skin remained purple. The arm and fingers were stiff. He was no expert and he knew that estimating the time of death, especially in a stiflingly hot apartment, was a crapshoot in the best of circumstances. But he guessed Peters had been dead for around as long as the people at the Trudeau House.

  “You better call your contact at the embassy.” Mark glanced at Decker.

  “Yes, sir.”

  But Decker didn’t move. His lips were pressed tightly together and he was breathing through his nose as he stared at Peters. Sweat glistened on his forehead. The air was hot, easily in the upper nineties. Behind Decker, sunlight streamed into the apartment through large sliding glass doors that led to a balcony. Mark had noticed a window-unit air conditioner in the living room, but it wasn’t on.

  “Come on,” said Mark. “We’ve seen enough.”

  Decker still didn’t move, so Mark turned around and grabbed his elbow. “Come on, buddy, let’s get some air.”