They were careful men, that much was clear.
He turned both of the jackets and trousers inside out, but found no identifying marks. The suits looked custom made. He could cut away the inner lining, hoping that the tailor had left some identifying marks on the interior. But then the owners would know that their room had been violated.
For a moment, Mark stood there, listening and thinking. He glanced at the shirts again. They hung on paper-encased dry-cleaner hangers. On a hunch, he undid the top two buttons on one of the shirts and slipped it off the hanger.
In light beige lettering, Mark read — in English — KLEINMANN CLEANERS, BEN YEHUDA STREET, TEL AVIV, 03/523-8967. Above the English was text that Mark couldn’t read but which Mark guessed was simply the same information in Hebrew.
Hebrew, he thought. That was the language he’d caught a snippet of down in the lobby.
40
Orkhan had just gotten off the phone with the director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency when his secretary rang.
Sounding flustered, she said, “Sir, they’re here for you. Five men, they won’t leave, I don’t know what to tell them, I—”
“What five men?”
“From the Interior Ministry. They have a warrant they say is signed by the president.”
“A warrant for what?”
“Sir, I’m sorry.”
“A warrant for what?” Orkhan repeated, though he knew the answer. He was going to be arrested and accused of leaking information about the operation in Nakhchivan to the Russians.
“For you, sir. For your arrest.”
“I see.”
His secretary was calling from the Ministry of National Security in downtown Baku, but Orkhan was at his home south of the city, seated on the periphery of an inner courtyard that extended out from his ground-floor office. Ten years earlier, he and his family had moved out of the densely populated part of the city and into this mansion. It was a move he’d come to regret. At the time he’d thought being in the desert highlands, with the other wealthy Bakuvians, in a fenced compound with a pool he’d never use and a state-of-the-art security system, was where he belonged. But he missed his old neighbors.
Still, he enjoyed his courtyard patio, particularly when it was sunny and hot, as it was today; even though he was wearing a suit and tie, he welcomed the heat. It sank into the dark fabric of his suit and deep into the knotted aches in his shoulders. The heat slowed him down, calmed him, helped him to think more clearly. A fountain in the center of the courtyard made a pleasant burbling noise.
First Mark Sava shows up, then a Russian spy is found to have evidence of the Nakhchivan operation, then someone tries to drop a bomb on the supreme leader of Iran, and now the interior minister was trying to arrest him.
Orkhan had a feeling that the confluence of all these events was not coincidental. Something big, and almost assuredly unpleasant, was about to happen. But what?
He eyed the guard standing at attention near the French doors that led to his office. He had a total of eight men here at his house. All loyal, all related to him by blood. There was a reason he had elected to work from home today; he’d suspected this was coming.
“This warrant,” he asked. “It has been signed by the president?”
“I saw the signature myself. What should I tell them?”
“Tell them the truth. If they wish to find me, I am at my home.”
Silence. Orkhan considered the public humiliation that was now being inflicted upon him. Five men, marching into his ministry.
He’d leave immediately, but two of his men would remain behind to challenge the warrant, to make the interior minister’s men wait, to buy time.
“Are you sure—”
“One more thing — record the names and positions of the five men now attempting to serve this warrant. This violation will not be forgotten. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly, sir.”
41
Were the two men he’d been following really Israelis? Had he really, Mark wondered, heard a snippet of Hebrew?
If they were Israelis, Mark guessed they’d immigrated to Israel from Russia and had been picked for this job because of their fluency in Russian. Assuming they were Israelis, though — what were they doing visiting a secret restricted area in Nakhchivan?
Mark could guess at part of the reason. Relations between Azerbaijan and Israel were surprisingly good, despite the fact that Azerbaijan was a predominantly Muslim nation. Because of all the regional sensitivities, neither country could publicly admit how close the relationship was, but Israel got around forty percent of its oil from Azerbaijan and Azerbaijan was buying Israeli arms — drones, antiaircraft and missile defense systems — at a rapid clip. In a leaked cable, the president of Azerbaijan had once compared the Azeri-Israeli relationship to an iceberg, where ninety percent was below the surface.
So if a couple of Israelis were traveling incognito to a secret restricted zone, Mark knew the likelihood was high that it was because the Israelis and Azeris were cooperating on some project, probably military in nature, they didn’t want the rest of the world to know about.
The only question was: what was it? An airstrip that couldn’t be seen from the air? Or had the engineer from Bazarduzu Construction been lying? Mark recalled the briefcases each of the Israelis had been carrying. He suspected answers to his questions lay inside them.
Mark stopped by his room at the Tabriz, stuck his iPad Mini in his back pocket and his permanent phone and two prepaids in his front pockets, placed his leather satchel in the closet — he hesitated to leave the painting unattended, but didn’t want to carry anything that would slow him down — and then exited the Tabriz on foot, intending to intercept the Israelis at the Goy-Gol restaurant and steal one of their briefcases.
His plans were disrupted, however, when a gaunt young man with eyes set too close together followed him out the door of the Tabriz — without even making much of an effort to be discreet about it. He looked too fair skinned to be a true Nakhchivani, but just as in Azerbaijan proper, the long Soviet rule had left a lot of Nakhchivanis with Russian blood in them.
Crap, he thought. He was hoping the guy was a Nakhchivani, because it would be bad news if the Russians had found him here. Whatever the case, he’d have to deal with the guy behind him first, and quickly, before the Israelis were done with their lunch. He exhaled, and pictured the layout of the city in his head, and where the Goy-Gol was relative to places he that might best ditch a tail. The path of least resistance, he told himself. Find it.
He began walking, at a fast clip, south down Heydar Aliyev Prospekti. His tail followed about fifty feet behind, not bothering to use pedestrians or vehicles as cover. Just past a mosque, Mark stepped into a virtually empty Soviet-era park that was several hundred feet wide, and equally long. There were no roads in the park, so he didn’t have to worry about being overtaken by someone in a car.
At the end of the park stood a ten-sided eighty-foot-tall 12th-century mausoleum that was decorated with the word Allah rendered in Arabic. Mark headed for it, but instead of going inside, ducked around the structure and began to sprint in a line he calculated would keep the mausoleum between him and his tail for the longest time possible.
That line took him through a tulip garden and then down a steep grassy embankment. At the bottom, he turned sharply to his left and, using the embankment as a blind now instead of the mausoleum, sprinted along the edge of a large public square that overlooked the Aras Reservoir. When he reached the southeast corner, he vaulted over a decorative waist-high metal fence and began to run down a steep hill overgrown with wild lilac bushes and evergreen trees.