56
Mark felt a sting on his chest and opened his eyes. He was on his back, staring up at a light. To the side of the light stood a jowly man with bloodshot blue eyes and a deeply wrinkled forehead. Gray chest hair tufted out around the top of the man’s button-down shirt, which was open at the collar.
Someone cursed, then said in Russian, “He wakes, give him more.”
Mark tried to remember where he was and what had happened to him.
Dammit that hurts…
He tried to put his hand to his chest — that’s where the pain was coming from, it felt as though he was being poked with something sharp and cold — but someone pulled his hand away and held it down.
“Don’t move!”
Mark coughed. It was still hard to breathe, the air just wouldn’t enter his chest. He felt consciousness slipping away from him again but he willed himself not to pass out. He tried to lift his head up, but someone pushed it down.
“Immobilize him!”
Strong hands pinned down both of his arms, then someone wrapped a rubber tube around his left forearm. Seconds later, the jowly man pulled out a needle. Mark tried to pull his arm away, but couldn’t. The struggle made him need to breathe more deeply, but he couldn’t — the air he needed just wouldn’t fit in his lungs. He felt as if he were drowning.
The jowly man hovered over him a moment. Mark smelled acrid underarm sweat, felt the needle enter his forearm, and then seconds later, the rush.
Those bastards. They were doing it to him again.
He struggled, but the hand on his arm held firm. He felt a burning sensation; moments later, it was as if something were pushing its way up his arm, and then his body began to feel light. It was an entirely new sensation, one he’d never experienced before.
Russians were talking. “OK, we try this again. Hold him. One, two—”
Mark felt a prick on his chest and then an awful sensation of metal slipping into his body, as though someone were slowly pushing a knife into him. He screamed, or thought he did. The sounds in the room melded with the air. It was as if he were floating. The surface beneath him no longer felt hard. His head was sinking; he tried to lift it.
He heard something that sounded flatulent, like a balloon that hadn’t been tied properly and was rapidly losing air.
“It’s done. Keep his arms pinned until he passes out.”
The hand on his forehead lifted. Mark raised his head. His vision was blurry, but he could see well enough to make out the grotesque horror that had been inflicted upon his body. Protruding from the left side of his chest was an enormous needle, part of which was encased in plastic. Blood ran from the incision point down the side of his chest. Attached to the top of the needle was what looked like the cut-off fingertip of a rubber latex glove. The fingertip was affixed to the end of the needle with a rubber band. The whole contraption looked sinister, the work of a crazed mind.
The needle looked as though it had been inserted close to his heart.
Get that thing out of my body.
As Mark tried to raise his head a bit higher, the flatulent sound started up again. And that’s when he realized that he was making the sound, or rather his body was. The fingertip on the end of the needle gave another belch as air escaped from it.
Mark lowered his head. The drug that had been injected into his arm was overwhelming him. He allowed himself to hope that he’d been hallucinating.
No, he thought, as he slipped into unconsciousness. What he’d just seen and heard had been far too real.
57
As they were passing through downtown Baku en route to Gobustan Prison, the general who had arrested Orkhan received a call on his cell phone. He answered it, listened a moment, said, “Yes, yes, of course I’ll hold.” And then, a minute later, said, “Of course, Mr. President. It’s just that I—”
Orkhan reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out the last of his cough drops and popped it into his mouth. He breathed deeply through his nose, enjoying the sensation of lemon scent rising through his nasal cavities.
“—yes, yes, Mr. President. No, no problem. I will bring him there at once.” The general clicked off his phone and turned to Orkhan. “We will not be going to Gobustan.”
“No?”
“No. The president wishes to see you.”
Orkhan took a moment to digest this new bit of information. “I see. Did the president say what he wanted?”
The general looked worried. “He did not.” A moment later, he said, “I truly am sorry about all this, Minister Gambar.”
Orkhan sucked on his cough drop as he wadded up the wrapper and let it fall to the floor. “I’m sure you are.”
Several upscale waterfront restaurants had recently sprung up on the shores of the Caspian south of Baku. At one, the president of Azerbaijan sat outside at a circular table, beneath a bright cerulean-blue umbrella. The air smelled of seaweed, and salt, and fish. Just offshore, oil rigs sparkled in the waning sun, as did the tower cranes that stood atop all the man-made islands under construction. Gentle waves surged up and down through the rock-pile breakwater.
Before Orkhan could get within a hundred feet of the president, he was stopped and frisked by the president’s bodyguards, a process that resulted in the confiscation of his phone. That minor indignity was compounded by the fact that, when Orkhan was brought to the president’s table, a large meal of what appeared to be beef tenderloin, served with a red wine reduction sauce of mushrooms and shallots, sat in front of the president. The rest of the table was bare.
It was dinnertime. Orkhan was hungry.
“Minister Gambar. Good of you to come.” The president skewered a piece of beef and stuck it in his mouth.
“Mr. President.”
“You were right. About the Russians.” The president spoke with his mouth full. His fork clattered to his plate, and he nervously wiped his mouth with a napkin that lay on the table. “Dubov just held a press conference.”
Dubov was the Russian foreign minister.
The president, his voice laced with equal parts anxiety and derision, continued, “He warns the Iranians not to attack, that Russia would see this as an unacceptable encroachment on the Russian sphere of influence. He spoke of troops at their base in Armenia. In South Ossetia. In Dagestan. You were right. The Russians, they have prepared for this.”
Orkhan considered the president’s words. “Sphere of influence. He dared to say that, did he? The dog.”
“They have no shame.”
Orkhan drummed his fingers on the table. “And the Russian ambassador. What does he say?”
“That Russia is willing to offer military assistance if Azerbaijan should need it. Generous of him.”
“Should we need it,” repeated Orkhan. Now it was clear. Now he knew the Russian plan. But it was happening even faster than he thought it would.
He looked out to the nearest of the man-made islands under construction in the Caspian. The islands were to be Azerbaijan’s answer to Dubai. There would be luxury hotels, a Formula One racetrack — there were even plans to build the tallest skyscraper in the world. Orkhan had never liked the thought of turning Baku into a mini-Dubai, but he liked even less the idea of the Russians putting a stop to it. No one would want to invest in an Azerbaijan dominated by Russia.