“This is important, Ted.”
“OK. But why call me, Mark?” Kaufman spoke with a tone of unenthusiastic resignation; Mark imagined that Kaufman’s wife heard that tone a lot.
“I just told you. I need you to run some names for me.”
“Is this for one of your CAIN projects?”
“In a way, yeah.”
“A project Central Eurasia currently has open with CAIN?”
Mark looked around Victory Square. Dusk was approaching. All the flowerbeds, which in summer had been a riot of color, were now empty save for the broken vodka bottles. The Kyrgyz really knew how to do flowers right, Mark thought. Seeing the place so barren now made him think of the fast-approaching winter again. He knew it wouldn’t be long before the cold from the mountains descended into the city. As he scanned the crowd, he felt a fleeting pang of claustrophobia.
“I don’t know. You tell me.” Mark didn’t want to stab Holtz in the back, but if Holtz had tried to run a Near East op in Central Eurasia on the sly, then Holtz had stabbed himself in the back.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means it’s related to a Near East op.”
“Super. Then you know who to call.”
Kaufman was a by-the-books bureaucrat. He stuck to his turf and expected others to do the same.
“A Near East op that’s being run in your area of operations. An op they hired CAIN to execute.”
Silence. Then, “Are you pulling my leg?”
“Wish I was.”
“What op?”
“Well, here’s the thing. When CAIN takes on these jobs, we sign confidentiality agreements.”
“Don’t give me that crap, Sava. What is Near East up to?”
“Like I said, I need you to run the names of a couple Saudis for me. I’d remind you that my top-secret security clearance was renewed when I joined CAIN. I’m an approved Agency contractor. You help me out, I might be in the mood to share with you what Near East was up to in your backyard.”
Kaufman let a few seconds pass. “Deal.”
Mark briefly powered up his old cell phone, texted Kaufman the images of the driver’s licenses, then shut his phone back down and removed the battery again. As he was walking away from Victory Square, he called Daria on one of his prepaid phones.
“Get your iPod,” he said. “I’m going to call it.”
Though an iPod Touch was typically just used as a small digital tablet device — it was pretty much an iPhone, minus the phone part — Daria had rigged hers in such a way that it could be used to make calls over the Internet. The downside was that it had to be connected to a wireless network for the phone function to work. The upside was that when it did work, the call was untraceable.
Mark rang Daria’s iPod, filled her in on the details of his conversation with Holtz, then asked about Muhammad.
“He likes ice cream,” said Daria. “And banging pots.”
“Is he talking about his parents dying, or Jordan?”
“No, but I asked him where he’s from. He says he lives in ba-bay. I haven’t been able to figure out what that means yet. And I think he misses someone he calls Anna. He says she’s an adult, pretty, plays with him, feeds him, and isn’t his mother. I’m guessing it was someone who helped raise him, like a nanny. He’s been calling out for her, walking around the house looking for her.”
“All right. See what else you can find out. I’m working a few angles on my end.”
“When do you think you’ll be home?”
Mark hesitated. He could make calls from their condo, but his gut was telling him that it would be better to keep his distance. The last thing he needed was for Holtz or Kaufman to hear Muhammad crying in the background.
“I don’t know,” he said. “As soon as I can.”
As he was walking through a narrow alley that ran between two massive khrushchevka apartment buildings — old housing units built during the Khruschev era — Mark called Holtz. His prepaid cell phone crackled.
“Listen, I talked to Rosten,” said Holtz. “He’s pissed to hell and insists you release the kid to me. Like now.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen.”
“I’m telling you, Mark — he’s livid. He’s flying into Bishkek ASAP. He wants you to meet him at the embassy.”
“He’s pissed that I saved the kid? From being abducted by two Saudis?”
“No, he’s pissed that you won’t tell me where the kid is now.”
“Well, he can stay pissed. What did he have to say about the Saudis?”
“That the op has been compartmentalized and that we’re not cleared to know about the Saudi compartment.”
“Yeah, we’ll see about that.”
Mark called Kaufman back.
“They’re both GIP intelligence officers. Both were in our database.” As Kaufman recited the real names of the Saudi kidnappers, Mark committed them to memory. The GIP, he knew, stood for General Intelligence Presidency, which is what the Saudi equivalent of the CIA called itself. “The older of the two has been with Saudi intelligence for twenty years. The younger guy, just three.”
“Are they working with the Agency?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know or won’t say?”
“Don’t know. Which, in my book, is a serious problem. What’s Near East up to in my division, Sava?”
When Mark had told Kaufman everything he knew, Kaufman broke in, “That peckerhead Rosten’s really flying into Bishkek? And I don’t know about it?”
“You do now,” Mark pointed out.
“Rosten had better have been acting on orders from on high on this one. Because if he made the call to run a Near East op in my territory without telling me, I’ll skewer the bastard. As for Holtz, did he really think he could get away with this?”
“I don’t think the slight was intentional. So you’re going to confront Rosten on this?”
“Damn right I am.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“I’ll call you back.”
Mark hung up, reasonably satisfied with the way things were going. And content, he realized, to be back in the field — even if it was only a temporary thing.
He’d never regretted leaving the CIA — he hadn’t been cut out to be a station chief. He realized that now. All the cables from Langley; the obligation to suck up to a parade of desk-jockey bureaucrats full of ideas completely divorced from reality; the need to kowtow endlessly to the ambassador and by extension the State Department; trying to motivate risk-averse ops officers who liked to spend more time in the embassy than in the field; constantly worrying about covering his ass and the asses of people who worked for him because he could never be certain that the bureaucrats in Langley had his back…
No, he didn’t miss any of that. But he did miss being in the field. He missed the satisfaction of running actual operations.
10
Twenty-five miles south of Bishkek, former Navy SEAL John Decker was enjoying the view of Ala Archa National Park almost as much as he was enjoying the view of the buxom Australian woman who was pinned, missionary-style, beneath him.
She was twenty-three years old, almost six feet tall, strong, rubber-band flexible, and had this beads-woven-into-her-hair thing going on that Decker thought was just fantastic. Her fingers were calloused from rock climbing and felt good on his chest, which she was rubbing to the rhythm of their lovemaking.
A little over seven months earlier, Decker’s six-foot-four frame had taken a serious beating — the result of an ill-fated excursion into Iran. The German physical therapist who’d treated him at a high-end medical center in Almaty, Kazakhstan, had been into yoga and rock climbing. After beginning a one-month fling with her, Decker had decided he was into yoga and rock climbing too. And that was how he’d healed.