Rosten smiled back. Mark noticed his teeth were kind of yellowed.
“A real stickler for the law, aren’t you, Val?”
Mark wasn’t all that worried about Rosten going after Daria’s funds either. Given her shaky history with the US, Chinese, Azeri, and Iranian intelligence services, she’d taken care to arrange her accounts in such a way that the funds were protected from people nursing a grudge.
“I get things done. Finally, I’ll make sure to get you PNGed from Kyrgyzstan and any other country you try to set foot in. You’ll wind up either having to come home to the States or hole up in Somalia or North Korea.”
PNG stood for persona non grata. Once a country PNGed a person, it meant they had to leave. That was why Mark and Daria had been forced to leave Azerbaijan.
“I’m not that fond of the idea of Somalia.”
“Think about it, Sava. I’m not playing around here. I’m sorry you had to get involved with this and I don’t fault you for your actions to date. They’ve been perfectly reasonable. My bad for relying on that meathead Holtz. Even though I wasn’t going through you, I honestly thought that with you involved with CAIN, this whole thing would have been handled more competently. But none of that matters now. This is it. It’s time to give up the kid.”
Mark sighed. He tapped his index finger on the table top for a bit, then asked, “If I were to give you Muhammad, what would you do with him?”
“I’d get him to another orphanage and placed with a good family as soon as possible. The Agency’s willing to pay to see that he gets to the front of the line with any adoption outfit.”
“It might get a little tricky. I wasn’t bluffing about Daria. She doesn’t care about whatever op you’re running. Her only concern is the kid.”
“I’m sure you’ll be able to figure something out.”
“I’d have to retrieve him myself.”
“I’m up for a drive. After what happened with Buckingham, we’re going to trust but verify from here on out.”
21
Decker lived in a dumpy part of north Bishkek, mainly because he was too cheap to pay to live in a better part of town. He figured he was traveling for work half the time, and when he wasn’t working, he was usually climbing or traveling for pleasure, so why spend a fortune on a place he was only going to use a couple times a month?
Jessica parked the Explorer in front of his one-bedroom house. Down the street, lights were on in the other tightly packed homes. Decker hopped out of the car, still carrying Muhammad, and opened the steel door with his key. The door led to a little walled-in courtyard in front of his home.
“And here we are!” he said cheerfully to Muhammad.
Decker liked his courtyard — he liked the wild pumpkin vines growing all over the courtyard’s cinderblock walls; he liked the little patch of overgrown grass where he’d set up a hibachi; he liked the plastic beer coolers that doubled as benches. He and Jess had sat on those coolers just three nights before, drinking beer around a little wood fire that he’d started in the hibachi.
He recalled that just two weeks earlier, on an unseasonably warm day in October, he’d set up a card table and had played narde outside with Mark. Decker smiled as he remembered how sour Mark had been after losing the first game.
He turned back to Jessica as he stepped through the doorway. “Maybe I’ll fire up the grill tonight, make some s’mores, have a little cookout.”
“I’m pretty sure a fire near the ground and a two-year-old kid isn’t a good combination. Let’s just get settled.”
It was a tiny place; one room on the ground floor served as a bedroom, living room, and small kitchen. In the minuscule bathroom, the hot-water heater — which looked like a giant cooking pot with a couple of suspicious-looking electrical wires stuck into it — sat on a rickety wooden shelf above the toilet.
On the upside, Decker had bought a sixty-inch flat-panel television, a home theater system, and a desktop computer that he never turned off because he hated waiting for the thing to boot up.
When he set Muhammad down on the floor, the child scrunched up his face, as though getting ready to cry. So Decker leaned over, grabbed all four pillows from his bed, and threw them down on the floor.
“One of those was mine,” said Jessica.
Decker held Muhammad and bounced him up and down on the mountain of pillows until Muhammad got the idea and started jumping on them himself.
“We’ll have movie night,” said Jessica. “Until he falls asleep.”
“Movie night,” said Decker, liking the idea. “Sounds good. We’ll make the best of it.”
He sat on the bed, ran his hand through his hair, and thought about his dad. And his brother. And his mom. Damn. Jessica sat down next to him and put her arm around his shoulder — as much of her arm as she could, that is. Deck was too big for her to really embrace.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said. “You can handle things until I’m out?”
If he hadn’t had to look after Muhammad, Decker would have jumped in with Jessica. “Yeah, I’ll go after you.”
Then Decker’s desktop computer beeped five times. Loudly.
Muhammad stopped climbing the mountain of pillows and looked at the computer.
“What was that?” asked Jessica.
Decker walked to his computer and tapped the mouse. The screen came to life. In the upper left-hand corner of it, three black-and-white video feeds were displayed, each in a separate window.
One of the screens showed the figure of a man.
“Turn on the shower,” Decker whispered urgently.
When he’d first moved in, back in the spring, Decker had rigged up a rudimentary surveillance system. Three commercially available exterior video cameras communicated wirelessly with his desktop computer. In addition, the metal door that led to the courtyard had been wired to send a signal to the computer whenever it was opened. Originally, Decker had also set motion detectors on the tops of the courtyard walls, but the red squirrels, who had come to eat his pumpkins, had set off so many false alarms that he’d shut that system down.
“Why? What’s that beeping?”
“Intruder. Go now.”
Jessica half-walked, half-ran to the bathroom. Decker clicked on the video feed in which the figure was visible.
Bruce Holtz was pocketing a long silver electronic lock pick and walking across the small courtyard.
“A guy’s about to knock,” whispered Decker. He rushed up to his front door and silently engaged the dead bolt. “Tell him you’re taking a shower, you’ll get the door in a minute.”
“Tell who?”
Decker pointed to the door. A second later, a fist rapped loudly on it.
“Hey, Deck! It’s Bruce! Open up!”
The house had four windows — one on each side. Two of the windows looked out onto Decker’s small courtyard. The remaining two looked out onto intersecting garbage-strewn alleys, which doubled as a breeding ground for stray dogs. All the windows had heavy curtains pulled over them; the alley-facing ones were protected by metal bars. The same day he’d moved in, however, Decker had bought a welding torch at a local hardware store and cut an access hatch of sorts through one of the barred windows — so that in a pinch, he’d have more than one avenue of escape.
“Deck, open up! I know you’re in there!”
As he grabbed a key from his desk, Decker made eye contact with Jessica and gestured to the door.
“Hold on!” called Jessica. “I’m in the shower, I can’t get the door.”
“Is Decker in there?”
“Give me a minute, I’m in the shower.”
Decker heard the whir of the electronic lock pick engaging. Holtz, you son of a bitch, he thought. Trying to bust in on my girlfriend while she’s in the shower. I’ll remember that.