But before disappearing into the vegetation, he cast a quick glance back up the hill — and that was when he really began to worry. A man — shorter and older than the one who’d originally been following him — was climbing over the fence. Mark ran, dodging branches, then hit a road, and sprinted south as fast as he could, downhill, searching for escape routes and improvised weapons, thinking this was exactly the type of situation he was too damn old for.
Behind him he heard footsteps pounding on pavement. By now, Mark was breathless and his chest was heaving.
“Stop!” The word was spoken in English, but with a heavy Russian accent. Glancing behind him as he ran, Mark saw yet another guy, this one young and lithe, built like a cross-country runner.
A line of parked cars came up fast on Mark’s right. He made for the first, as if he planned to run right over it. Instead he hit the front grill with his right foot, pivoted a hundred and eighty degrees and instead of stopping, charged. As they collided, Mark tried to slam his fist into the man’s throat, but only half succeeded. Momentum carried them both onto the hood of the car. As they fell, Mark threw another punch to the throat and this time connected.
A hundred feet away, a car was speeding toward them. Another car appeared from behind, the engine revving far louder than normal. Mark cut left, but the guy who’d been following him from the Tabriz had caught up and was trying to outflank him.
The Tabriz guy produced a pistol and fired two low shots — he appeared to be aiming for the legs — but missed. Running for all he was worth, Mark eyed the wooded hill that paralleled the road. Running back to it now would be crazy, but he was boxed in and there was nowhere else to go. His only option was to try to lose the men who were after him in the lilacs and evergreens that covered the hill.
The slope was steep, and Mark was tired. He climbed up maybe twenty feet, then turned sharply to his left. Below him he heard bodies crashing into the woods. Above him, from the edge of the public square by the mausoleum, he heard shouts, people issuing orders — in Russian — to the people below.
Dammit all.
A small army was chasing him. Why, though? What had he stumbled upon that that was so important?
He estimated that the odds he was going to get caught were approaching a hundred percent. He cursed under his breath, took a few more steps walking as quietly as he could, rolled under the low branches of a tall pine tree, and pulled out one of his prepaid phones.
42
Daria tested the water in the small plastic baby bath with her index finger — it was warm, but not too warm — and then slowly lowered Lila into it for the first time, the small umbilical-cord wound on Lila’s belly button having healed over to the point where Daria thought it was OK to submerge it. She squeezed out a little baby shampoo onto a yellow duck-shaped washcloth and began to clean her daughter.
Lila cooed and her mouth formed what Daria imagined was a smile, even though she knew babies weren’t supposed to really be able to smile with happiness at that age.
“You like that, don’t you?” Daria was on her knees in front of the bathtub. The baby bath was inside the larger tub. She tickled Lila’s belly a bit. “Bath time is fun for Lila!”
After washing what little hair Lila had, she moved on to her daughter’s feet, then hands.
She wondered whether her own mother — her birth mother, that is, the one who’d been murdered in Iran when Daria was just a baby — had ever washed her like this, ever loved her like this?
But of course she had, Daria told herself. She’d been feeling close to her mother of late, closer than she’d ever felt before. She thought now of what it would be like to be separated from Lila by death, the way she and her mother had been separated, and a wave of emotion swept through her — longing for Lila, sympathy for her mother, sadness for what might have been…
Lila made another cooing sound.
“Mommy’s thinking crazy thoughts, isn’t she?” She tickled Lila’s tummy. “Tell Mommy not to worry so much.”
She was bound to worry, though, especially with Mark gone. It had been two and a half days since they’d last talked. She had no idea where he was. She wondered whether it was going to be like this for the rest of their lives — with Mark always taking off and her sitting at home, anxious, tending to Lila.
That would suck.
Their agreement — partially spoken, partially unspoken — was that they would share responsibility for Lila, each pitching in as needed. It wasn’t that Daria minded taking care of Lila now, far from it, the joy she felt was sometimes intense, but in the back of her mind she wondered whether Mark thought…
“You’re worrying again,” she said out loud. “Stop worrying.” Then, “OK, let’s finish up this bath.”
When Lila was all clean, Daria lifted her onto a white baby towel that she’d spread out on a terrycloth bathmat.
“OK, let’s get you dry.”
Daria’s phone, which she’d left on the kitchen table, chirped once. She finished drying Lila and swaddled her in the towel. On the way to the changing table, she passed by the kitchen and glanced at her phone.
The text message was from a number she didn’t recognize. She tapped the screen. At first glance, she thought the actual message was blank, but then she realized that there was a single x in the upper left-hand corner.
“Oh, no,” she said. “No, Mark, no…”
43
Orkhan sat in the rear seat of his armored black Suburban. Accompanying him were two bodyguards, both second cousins by marriage; his driver, who was one of his many nephews; and his personal assistant. They had just pulled out of Orkhan’s driveway and were now speeding down from the hills above Baku.
“Sir, where to now?” asked the driver.
Orkhan considered. His spies in the Interior Ministry were already investigating what the interior minister was up to. But if he allowed himself to be caught before his men got to the bottom of this — if it became widely known that he’d been imprisoned and had fallen out of favor with the president — then all but his most loyal men would abandon him.
No one would abandon him, however, until the warrant was served.
“First to Nardaran. We’ll pay a surprise visit to the ayatollah, to see whether he knows anything about this bombing in Tehran.” Nardaran, which lay twenty miles northeast of Baku, was the most religiously conservative town in Azerbaijan. Orkhan, though not a particularly observant Muslim himself, maintained good relations with the local ayatollah by making sure the donation boxes at the mosque were full; in return the ayatollah informed on Muslim extremists.
Orkhan’s cell rang. He checked the ID; it wasn’t a number he recognized, so he handed the phone to his assistant. “Answer it on speaker, find out what they want. If it’s for me, tell them we’re already in Nardaran and that I’m in a meeting.”
Orkhan’s assistant, a burly man with a fat neck and a short beard, answered the phone.
“Orkhan?” said the caller.
“Who is this?”
“Where is Minister Gambar?” The voice was a whisper.