When they’d gone about five kilometers, and the coast was nothing more than a distant brown blur in the heat, Decker said, “Fuckin’ A, there’s a boat out there. Two o’clock.”
Mark couldn’t see anything. Just waves, a few whitecaps, and an indefinite horizon blurred by low clouds. “Where are they headed?”
“Toward us.”
“What kind of boat?”
Decker fiddled with the binoculars. “Looks like a Zodiac. Hauling ass.”
Mark’s plan had been to drive to the end of the stilt road, block the way back, and then confront whoever was in the van. “Can you take out the tires from here?”
“Maybe, but it could send them swimming.”
Mark glanced down at the water. It looked shallow, but twenty feet was plenty to drown in. “Check the boat again.”
“Same course,” said Decker. And then, “I can see three men.”
Mark considered — had someone gotten to Daria’s guards? Someone who inspired more fear, or was shelling out more money, than Orkhan? “Take out the tires.”
Decker retrieved his Glock from his ankle holster, rolled down the window, leaned his head out, and then shot twice without even appearing to aim. Both rear tires on the van burst. The van veered to the left, but then the driver overcompensated and sent the vehicle careening over the right edge.
21
For an instant Daria felt weightless, and then suddenly the bottom of the van slammed up into her with an explosive smack.
She bolted up in the darkness and fumbled for the rear door handle, hoping the force of what had to have been a crash had somehow popped open the lock. It hadn’t.
Then came the water — first lapping at her ankles and seconds later rising to her shins. As it reached her knees, she swiveled and waded toward the front of the van, finding in the dark the locked metal door that led to the driver’s compartment.
She was about to cry out for help when someone ripped it open.
Blinding sunlight spilled in. A face slowly came into view. Through the windshield of the van all she could see was open sea. She wondered whether she was losing her mind.
They’d been driving. On a dirt road, she’d thought, bumping over what had felt like potholes.
A huge hand encircled her arm and yanked her into the open water. The van was sinking, its driver swimming away at top speed. A strange wood road loomed above her.
“Can you swim?”
The man who’d pulled her out had an enormous rectangular head and blue eyes. He smiled at her in a goofy way that put her at ease.
“I think. Who are—”
“John Decker! Mark sent me!”
“He’s here?”
“Up on the road.”
Daria saw him now. He was staring down at her, looking worried.
“Get your ass up here!” Mark yelled. “We’re going to have company!”
Daria crawl-stroked to the road and began to shimmy up one of the thick wood stilts just as Mark appeared from above and extended a hand down. With a wiry strength that surprised her, he hauled her up onto the road.
Decker joined them a second later.
“I can’t outrun them in reverse,” said Mark.
Daria saw the boat — a distant black Zodiac filled with armed men. And that was when she understood how disastrously she’d miscalculated. Dragging Mark into this had been wrong, so wrong. She’d been deluding herself — thinking that it had been some kind of bad-luck coincidence that she’d been with Campbell when he’d been shot.
It hadn’t been a coincidence. It had been blowback for what she’d done. She’d been a target then, just like she was now.
“Turn the car!” said Decker. He groaned as he leaned his barrel chest into the front fender. When Mark joined him, the Niva moved a bit.
“Push!” said Decker through clenched teeth.
Daria threw her weight into it too and together the three pivoted the car so that it was facing the shore. They all jumped in. Mark threw the car into gear, slammed his foot down on the gas pedal, and didn’t look back.
22
A half hour later, Mark pulled onto a narrow dirt road that intersected the highway to Baku and cut between two shallow salt lakes. He stopped at a pumping station near the south lake and parked between the empty building and an enormous wastewater pipe that had once drained toxins from a nearby Soviet factory into the lake.
“We need a little privacy,” he said to Decker. Then he remembered how the guy had vaulted over the side of the stilt road, and added, “Please.”
He hadn’t told Decker anything about Daria’s relationship to the CIA, or why she’d been imprisoned at Gobustan.
“Where do you want me?”
“Take cover somewhere, watch the road. And let us know if anyone’s coming.”
Once they were alone, Mark told Daria about the carnage at the Trudeau House, and about what had happened at Peters’s apartment. He finished by saying, “Aside from the support staff at the embassy, the two of us are the only CIA personnel in Azerbaijan. For now at least.”
Daria put her hand to her mouth as she listened. She was in the passenger seat, still soaking wet. With her black silk blouse plastered to her body, she looked thin and fragile. Eventually she whispered, “I can’t tell you how…” She put her hand to her mouth again, as though trying to stuff the emotion back inside her. He could hear her breathing through her nose. “…how grateful I am.”
The sun was beginning to go down; it hung low in the sky, a red ball suspended just above the bleak desert.
Her fingers lightly touched his shoulder.
Mark was reminded of when they’d met up a year ago, at a crowded bar. She’d touched his shoulder then too — just before slipping a thumb drive loaded with Iranian bank records into his hand. Their faces had been inches from each other when she’d whispered the encryption code, and they’d both lingered in that intimate space for a few beats longer than they should have.
Afterwards Mark had reminded himself that thinking with one’s dick was a dangerous way to collect intelligence. He reminded himself of that again now.
“Listen,” he said, “I need you to tell me what was going on between you and Campbell.”
She pulled her hand away.
“Nothing. I’d never met him before.”
“Well, he knew you.”
She looked confused. “No, he didn’t.”
“Campbell requested that you translate for him at the convention.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, Kaufman told me he called up the ambassador and asked for you by name. Now why would he do that?”
“I have no idea. Campbell wasn’t even here on government business, he worked for himself as a consultant. It was a joke that I was even assigned to help him, like he couldn’t just hire his own translator. I figured the ambassador owed him a favor or something.”
“Well, there has to be a reason that a former deputy sec. def. wanted you as his translator.”
Daria shot him a look.
“By the way,” said Mark, “I still have my security clearance. And Kaufman authorized you to talk to me.” Which wasn’t quite true.
“I’m not lying to you.”
“I didn’t say that you were.”
“You were thinking it.”
Mark reflected on the contradiction inherent to Agency fieldwork: that so much of an operations officer’s life involved deception and lies — indeed, being a good liar was a central job requirement — but that when it came to intra-Agency communication, those same officers were suddenly expected to be scrupulously honest. Of course, that didn’t always happen. When he’d been an operations officer, he’d sometimes had difficulty respecting that sharp line between acceptable conduct in the field and acceptable conduct in the office.