The professor was punching buttons on his phone, trying to get a dial tone, glaring at Mark as he did so.
“I’ll be leaving now,” said Mark. “Thanks for your help.”
He scooped up his coffee and downed the rest of it in one long slug. He considered leaving the empty cup on his old desk but decided not to be a jerk.
As Mark left the university, intending to check out the new Port Baku mall to see about getting diaper cream — he had time to kill while waiting for the Ganja branch chief’s alias packet — he was thinking about where he’d live. Definitely somewhere on the east side of town, where he’d be less likely to run into former academic colleagues. Maybe in one of the new high-rises. He wondered how much a penthouse condo would cost — maybe instead of a balcony he’d have a whole rooftop patio. How about that? He envisioned setting up a little jungle gym for Lila; she’d be crawling soon enough.
But when he pictured himself with Daria and Lila on top of the roof, lounging in the sun, the image only lasted a moment before he began to imagine Lila crawling to the edge, curious, then trying to climb what would probably be a protective wall that was far too low.
A rooftop patio, with a little kid…what was he thinking? But if a rooftop wasn’t safe, would any balcony be—
Mark stopped short. Shit.
Two men were approaching, both dressed in dark suits with white shirts. He considered making a run for it — he had plenty of avenues of escape, and he’d noticed them in time — but stopped himself because he didn’t sense danger the way he had in Tbilisi, and he trusted his instincts.
“Mark Sava?”
“No,” said Mark.
“Mr. Sava, we are here on behalf of someone who would like to meet with you.”
The one who had spoken, a stocky man with a helmet-style haircut and a thick monobrow in need of a trim, had done so in perfect Azeri. Mark breathed a little easier.
“Who?”
“If you could come with us, please.”
“You must be kidding.”
A silence ensued. The man gestured to a Mercedes idling on the street.
Mark said, “I’m not getting in your car.”
“I am not inviting you. I am ordering you.”
“I’m not getting in the car.”
“Get in the car.”
“No.”
The men glanced at each other. The one who had spoken first shrugged, then said, “It’s not that far. We can walk.”
Mark was tempted to make a belated run for it. But he still wasn’t getting the sense that these guys meant to do him harm. “Walk to where?”
The man considered, then named a restaurant in old Baku that Mark knew well.
“Who runs this restaurant?”
The name offered matched the name Mark knew.
“How will we get there?”
“Istiglaliyyat, right, left to Kichik Qala, then—”
“OK, I know it, I’ll follow you.”
From the way they spoke Azeri, the quick answers to his questions, and the easy way the men carried themselves, they almost certainly were Azeris, Mark determined. Probably — given their civil-servant uniformity — from the Ministry of National Security. And the Azeris, while not exactly his allies, weren’t his enemies either.
Mark raised his empty coffee cup with his left hand and gestured down the street, drawing the attention of the two men away from his right hand, which he dipped into his back pocket. He palmed his alias packet, and then transferred the empty coffee cup into his right hand, using it to hide the alias packet.
After a minute of walking, they passed an urn-shaped garbage bin. The garbage around downtown, Mark remembered, was emptied every day — but not until early in the morning, just before dawn. He tossed the coffee cup, and his identification, into the urn.
22
There were few things in this world that intimidated Orkhan Gambar, but his daughter was one of them.
As Azerbaijan’s Minister of National Security — the Azeri equivalent of the CIA—he was used to doing the intimidating. Thousands of men and women worked under him. When he arrived for work each morning, dropped off by a black limousine in front of the ministry building on Parlament Prospekti, the halls were always silent save for the occasional muted, “Good morning, Minister Gambar.” Doors were opened, heads were down at desks.
Deference, that’s what he was accorded. Deference and respect. His daughter, however, accorded him neither.
At present, Orkhan was seated in a cool stone-walled basement of a restaurant in old Baku, attempting to conduct a Skype video chat with his daughter. He tapped on his smart phone. “I think I have it now,” he said, speaking loudly.
“I still can’t see you,” snapped his daughter, who was in Paris.
She’d sent him a text late last night, asking him whether he could make time for a video chat today. Of course he could, he’d said, but that had been before this business with Sava had come up, and truth be told, he wasn’t good with the video thing.
“I have done everything exactly as you said!” Orkhan insisted.
“Well, it’s not showing up — all I have is the audio. Make sure the app knows to use the internal camera on your phone. It might be thinking you want to use an external camera.”
It annoyed him that she spoke to him as if he were the child. “This app — where do I look for this?”
As his daughter attempted to instruct him, Orkhan grew increasingly frustrated. “This phone, it is broken, I think.”
She tried to instruct him again.
“Maybe we could just talk,” said Orkhan. “Maybe we don’t need the video.” He didn’t want to be sharp with his daughter, but enough already. Sava would be here soon.
A sigh of frustration and disappointment—how could you possibly be so stupid? — then, “OK. We just talk.”
“How are your studies progressing?”
“Fine.”
When it came to his daughter, Fatima, that was one thing Orkhan didn’t have to worry about. She was everything his doltish son was not — intelligent, energetic, and hardworking. She’d applied to, and had been accepted at, the Sorbonne. The Sorbonne. It filled him with pride him just to think of it. And this based entirely on her own merits.
“And your job?”
“Ata, I have something we need to talk about. It is important, that is why I wanted the video.”
Orkhan leaned his head back and stroked his mustache. “What is important?”
“I’ve decided to apply for French citizenship.” A half-minute passed. “Ata? Are you still there?”
“You wish to have joint Azeri and French citizenship? Fatima, this…this…well, you know my position, this could be complicated.”
“Not joint citizenship.”
“Fatima.”
“I’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“Subhan’Allah, Fatima!” Glorious is God!
For seventeen years she had been an obedient girl, but a year ago everything had changed when he’d had her boyfriend, a sniveling long-haired man-child who professed to be a poet — Orkhan suspected the boy had gypsy blood in him — arrested for attending a pro-democracy rally in downtown Baku.
Although Orkhan had made sure that the arrest was made by the local police, not his men, that was when Fatima had started with all her questions.
Why had her boyfriend been arrested when other protestors had not? And what could be done about it? And then, after poisoning her mind with articles she’d read online: why was the legal system in Azerbaijan so blatantly unfair? Why was Azerbaijan saddled with a dictatorship when it was clear that the future belonged to the democracies of the world? And what was her father doing to make things better?