“Nardaran. Speak louder.”
“I need to talk to him. Now.”
“He is in a meeting.”
“Interrupt him. Tell him it’s Mark Sava.”
“Sava?” Orkhan asked.
“Orkhan, pick up. I’ve only got seconds, I’m about to be taken.”
Orkhan grabbed his phone back and took it off speaker. “Talk to me, Sava.”
“I have information for you, but first I need your help.”
“What information?”
“About your operation in Nakhchivan.”
Two beats, then, “What do you know of this? And why didn’t you tell me what you knew two days ago in Baku?”
“No time now, Orkhan. I have seconds. Send help.”
“What is your location?”
“Nakhchivan City, near the Momine Khatun mausoleum. Can your men track me from my phone?”
“Yes, but—”
“I’ll leave it on as long as I can. I’m in a tight spot.”
“Mark, what—”
“They’re here.”
“Mark?” Orkhan took the phone away from his ear and stared at it for a moment. He put it back to his ear. “Mark?”
The connection had been severed.
44
Mark stuffed the prepaid he’d used to call Orkhan into his underpants. He pulled the second prepaid from his pocket just as someone grabbed his ankles and yanked him out from under the tree he’d been using for cover.
Two more men ran up. Mark noted that both carried MP-443 Grach pistols — a graceless but effective weapon favored by the Russian military. They kicked Mark repeatedly in the stomach and chest — he felt at least two ribs break — until he almost blacked out.
The word motherfuckers kept looping through his brain.
In Russian, “Drop the phone.”
In English, Mark said, “I don’t understand you!”
The response came in Russian-accented English. “Phone, you shit. Drop!”
Mark let the prepaid in his hand fall to the ground just as the Tabriz Hotel guy showed up.
While patting him down, they found and removed his wallet, iPad, permanent phone, and keys, but missed the prepaid he’d used to call Orkhan. Someone yanked him up. Mark just hung like dead weight.
“Walk!” one of them commanded.
Mark refused to do so — instead he pressed his legs close together, which helped him keep the prepaid lodged in his nether regions from falling out.
All four men pushed and dragged him back down the hill to a black Kia sedan that was idling on the side of the road. They heaved him into the back of the car, stuffed a canvas sack over his head, and pushed him onto the floor.
“Head down!”
Mark was in the process of complying when someone kicked his head to the floor. He felt a pistol on the back of his neck. A man climbed into the rear seat.
“You raise head, I shoot. You fight, I shoot. Understand?”
“Up yours.”
Another kick. “Eyes to ground. No question.”
They drove for maybe a half hour, during which time a boot was always jammed against the back of Mark’s head. The left side of his chest, where he’d broken a couple of ribs, hurt where it was pressed up against the floor of the car.
Even with the sack over his head he could detect the sun streaming in from the rear right-hand side of the car. It was late morning, so he calculated the sun would be shining from the southeast, which meant the rear right-hand side of the car was facing southeast, which in turn meant the front of the car had to be facing north.
They traveled over land that was flat, or nearly so, for most of the trip — until the end, that is, when they drove up a steep, winding slope for a few minutes before coming to a stop.
“Get out.”
Mark just lay there.
“I say get out!” A kick, then, in Russian, “Grab him.”
Mark clenched his arms to his chest and crossed his legs, preferring to endure more immediate pain than get out of the car of his own accord and risk dislodging the prepaid. When they tried to grab him, he let his body relax so that he was dead weight again. Three guys muscled him out of the back, then dragged him across what felt like a long stretch of pavement. He listened for other cars, or people, but heard none.
He was stuffed through what he guessed was a revolving door and into a carpeted and air-conditioned space.
“Where do they want him?”
“Downstairs. Guard him until General Titov gets here.”
“He knows we made the capture?
“Yes, yes, as soon as you reported from the city we told him. He will arrive later today.”
They were speaking in Russian, as though Mark wasn’t there.
“He wasn’t due until tomorrow.”
“Yes, I don’t understand it.”
“Is the prisoner hurt?”
“Not very.”
“Why won’t he stand?”
“Because he’s a cocksucker.”
They lugged Mark down several hallways, down a flight of stairs, then into an elevator. They descended. When the elevator opened, Mark smelled something metallic, or…he couldn’t quite place it. The air seemed particularly dry and cool, though. Through the canvas sack, he perceived a dim light.
Footsteps of men walking on gravel echoed off the walls. They dumped him on what felt like a bed with a saggy mattress. Springs squeaked beneath him as the bed settled. Mark rearranged himself so as to remove pressure from his broken ribs.
“OK, cocksucker, welcome to your new home.”
Someone laughed, then said, “I need a drink.”
“The bootlicker forbids it.”
A top being unscrewed from a bottle. “Screw Titov.”
45
Daria called John Decker.
“Mark’s been taken!” Cradling her phone between her shoulder and her ear, she was stuffing supplies — diapers, baby wipes, a digital thermometer, breast pads, a pacifier, a changing pad, and the crummy Chinese-made diaper cream — into Lila’s diaper bag.
“What happened?”
“I got the emergency text.” Daria crammed in another diaper and then struggled to zip the bag up. Lila had woken up and was crying in her bassinet.
“What text?”
“We’d agreed on a system. If he was ever in a situation where he thought he was about to be captured, he’d let me know, if he could. So that I’d know what happened to him, but also so that…” Daria didn’t want to say the words aloud. “Anyway, I’m packing now.”
“So that whoever had taken him couldn’t use you and Lila against him.”
“Yeah.” Threatening to harm, or actually harming, a prisoner’s family was a common way of conducting an interrogation. So she and Mark had taken some basic precautions. “We agreed on certain signals. I just got the worst one. Can you track a cell phone?”
“Here, yeah, we’ve got some connections, but not in Azerbaijan. The NSA could.”
“Deck, I don’t know…”
Lila was crying louder now.
“Where’d you last have a location on him?”
“Baku.”
“He went to Ganja after that, I wired him some money. If I push hard enough I should be able to get through to Kaufman. If he’s not a dick, he’ll leverage Agency resources to figure out where Mark called from. Forward me the text Mark sent you.”
“OK. Make Kaufman do this, Deck. He owes Mark.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t try, do it! If Kaufman screws Mark over on this, I swear I’ll come after him myself. You can tell him that too.”
“You know, you could always go to the embassy for the time being. No one could get to you there.”