What if they stayed in Bishkek and Lila got really ill in the months or years to come? If she suddenly spiked a high fever, where would they take her? Almaty was two hours away, across an international border.
She imagined trips to the local pediatrician’s office in downtown Baku. It would be a clean and orderly place. Instead of an old man who reeked of vodka — she thought of the anesthesiologist who’d inspired her to elect for a natural childbirth — it would be a woman in a white coat who smiled.
“Think they have Triple Paste diaper cream in Baku?” she asked. “It’s got lanolin in it. I want it.”
“I’ll check.”
“Either that or Desitin, the maximum-strength formulation, not the rapid relief one.”
“OK.”
“Baku will be great.” She didn’t really think that now, but she was hoping she would later, after she’d caught up on some sleep and didn’t have to worry about things like Kegel exercises and diaper rashes. “The news took me by surprise, and we’ll have to talk about the logistics of the move, but we’ll make it work. In the meantime, be safe.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Just remember, you’re a father now.”
“I’ll call or e-mail when I can. But from here on out, figure I’m on field rules. Maybe I should have started them earlier, but this whole thing’s just kind of snowballed.”
When Mark was on a job, he typically communicated with her only when absolutely necessary. He did it for the same reason that they’d both used complex anonymous corporate structures to register their respective professional enterprises, why Daria never allowed herself to be photographed with prospective donors to her foundation, why the last name on Lila’s birth certificate was Stephenson, and why she and Mark had alias documents in that name as well and had used that name when purchasing their apartment in Bishkek. It was all to create as secure a firewall as possible between their personal lives, and their lives — both past and present — in the intelligence underworld.
When it came to communications, even when they both took precautions, they could never be certain those communications weren’t being traced. So when Mark was on a job, radio silence with home was the rule.
“I know the drill,” said Daria.
19
Baku was booming.
The main airport terminal, which Mark blazed through on his way to the line of cabs out front, was completely new, all flashy curves and gleaming steel and glass — it was three times the size of the old one he’d passed through when he’d been kicked out of the country. The road from the airport, instead of the chaotic potholed mess that it had been just a few years ago, was now an eight-lane, newly paved modern highway that his cab driver navigated at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour — because he’d been promised a two hundred dollar tip if Mark arrived at the embassy in time for an important meeting. As Mark watched for cars that might be following him — he doubted many could keep up — he observed that the highway was lined with thousands of decorative street lamps, each one of which he guessed cost more than the average Azeri made in a year.
The boom, fueled by massive amounts of oil money, had already been well under way when Mark had gotten the boot, but it still surprised him to see — good Lord, there was even a Trump Tower — how much had changed in the time he’d been gone.
One thing that hadn’t, however, was the US embassy on Azadliq Prospect. Constructed during Baku’s first oil boom over a century earlier, before the Soviets had driven the Azeri oil industry into the ground, the building itself was grand — much nicer than the nuclear-bunker fortress-embassy that the US had built in Bishkek — but it was set behind high walls, and the utilitarian green-metal entrance door that one needed to pass through to get to it was reminiscent of an underfunded prison.
As Mark jogged up to the entrance, he thought, and not for the first time, would it kill the State Department to slap a fresh coat of paint on the entrance door, and paste up a sign that said something cheerful? WELCOME TO THE EMBASSY OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! WE’RE GLAD YOU CAME TO VISIT! Because for a lot of people, that grungy door was all they’d ever see of the United States.
At a little guard shack, Mark encountered security checkpoints manned by armed Azeris in blue uniforms. He noted the electric wiring in the little shack was still a mess — the circuit panel still lacked a cover — and the metal detector was the same ancient model that had been there for as long as he could remember.
He handed over his new passport, the one that the US embassy in Tbilisi had brought him, courtesy of Kaufman, just before he’d boarded his flight for Istanbul; it was brown, marking him as a US citizen engaged in official US business.
“Cell phone?” asked the guard, pointing to Mark’s shoulder bag. “Laptop?”
“I’m keeping them. Call for approval.”
Civilians were required to turn over all electronics, but not people who worked at the embassy.
“You have an appointment?”
“With Roger Davis.”
Officially, Davis was the embassy’s political counselor; unofficially, he was the CIA’s chief of station/Azerbaijan.
Permission to bring electronics into the embassy was denied, so Mark handed over Larry’s laptop and camera, along with his own phone, iPad, two charging cords, and an adapter for the iPad that allowed him to connect it to other devices;; in return, the guard gave him a laminated ticket with the number three on it.
A student intern met him at the marine guard checkpoint inside the main embassy building, but instead of bringing him to Davis, she ushered him to the pleasantly cluttered office of the public affairs officer and told him to wait.
He didn’t mind the first half hour. Baku was nine hours ahead of Washington, DC. Which meant that when people first arrived at the embassy in the morning, they’d have a mini-mountain of cables to sort through — everything that Washington would have sent during the course of the previous day back in the States. Because Mark had shown up at the embassy at 9:30 a.m., Davis might have been legitimately busy.
After an hour, the public affairs officer — a nervous woman who alternated between chewing her nails while staring at her computer and typing furiously on her keyboard — looked up as though seeing Mark for the first time, apologized for the delay, and asked whether he’d like some tea and cookies. Mark politely declined, but did ask for a phone so that he could call the US embassy in Georgia.
He managed to reach Keal, who’d had no luck finding Katerina. Mark suggested that the Georgian Bureau of Vital Records, or the state pension system that Georgians contributed to, might be able to help, especially if the request came directly from the US embassy. With a name, a birth month and year — July 1968—they should be able to find something. Keal reluctantly agreed to place a few more calls.
After an hour and a half, Mark announced that he needed to visit the restroom — he knew the way, no need to show him — and instead walked unmolested past the public affairs division, where a young foreign service officer was monitoring the Facebook and Twitter feeds of Azeri activists, and into his old office on the third floor.
Roger Davis was reclining in his executive chair, feet up on a six-foot-long oak desk that Mark had bought for the equivalent of twenty dollars when the Azeris had been clearing out a bunch of Soviet junk from Baku’s old city hall. Davis was reading Zaman, Turkey’s largest newspaper, and drinking from a liter bottle of Diet Coke.