But while Daria was a natural when it came to recruiting and manipulating foreign agents, Mark noted she was still a bit of a rookie in the countersurveillance department. To him, her movements were often obvious and easy to anticipate — good enough to flush out a tail of even above average skill, perhaps, but not someone with his kind of experience.
She walked the streets for over two hours. As she did, the city slowly came to life. Men pulled back metal grates covering their storefront windows and soon the smell of baking bread began to mix with the stink of diesel fumes.
Finally she ducked into an alley, pulled a headscarf and a black chador robe from her bag, and came out dressed as a conservative Muslim woman. She walked straight down Azadlyq Avenue until she came to the Central Bank of Azerbaijan, an angular modern building clad in brilliant copper-colored reflective glass. In front of the bank lay an open square with a long central wading pool awash in the delicate sunlight of dawn.
Using his binoculars, Mark observed Daria from a distance as she sat down on a bench by the pool. Then he called Decker and asked him to retrieve the Lada.
When Decker showed up, Mark got into the driver’s seat and parked the car a couple of hundred yards behind Daria. The morning commuters were beginning to come out, providing some cover.
“She’ll wait until seven when that bank, the Credit Azerbaycan, will let her in for off-hours access.” Mark pointed to a small brick building on the perimeter of the square, barely visible because it was tucked behind the much larger Central Bank.
“How would you know?”
When Mark didn’t answer, Decker said, “She a CIA agent?”
Mark hesitated, then said, “Operations officer.” Noting the blank look on Decker’s face, he said, “Operations officers get hired by the CIA in Washington and are then sent abroad to spy. Agents are the foreigners they recruit to spy for them. The other thing you should know is that she’s been operating in Baku under nonofficial cover. Which means she has no diplomatic immunity, no special protection, nothing. The embassy can’t even officially acknowledge her. Needless to say, you are not to repeat—”
“I can keep my mouth shut.”
“I know she kept a safe deposit box with her original US passport here at the Azerbaycan. The CIA has a relationship with the bank that allows her and other ops officers access outside of normal hours.”
“You know a lot about her.”
“I used to be her boss.”
“Why’d she run?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
29
Daria swiped her thumb across the fingerprint scanner and waited for a beep but none sounded.
The bank teller, a woman in her twenties who wore thick makeup caked over her acne-scarred face, frowned then pushed the reset button.
“Again.”
Daria did. Still no beep. “Is there a problem with the machine?”
“Sometimes it’s slow.”
“I’m actually in kind of a rush.”
And she was god-awful hot in her heavy chador. She wiped a bead of sweat from the top of her forehead, reminded herself to breathe normally, and glanced at her watch — five minutes after seven. Mark would almost certainly be awake by now.
She hoped he’d have the good sense to take refuge at the embassy.
“Should I try it again?”
The machine beeped. “There it goes. Now enter your password.”
Daria did so and was led to a room in the back of the bank. A minute later the teller placed her safe deposit box on a table in the center of the room.
“Ring me when you’re done.”
Daria locked the door from the inside and quickly opened the box. After confirming that a long strand of her hair still lay undisturbed across the top, she pushed her real US passport aside, revealing $2,000, an Iranian passport, an Iranian driver’s license, a second US passport, and a US driver’s license.
She hastily pocketed the altered documentation and the money and was about to put her real US passport back in the safe deposit box when she stopped herself.
At this point she should just throw the real one out, she thought. She couldn’t use it again, she’d burned her bridges. And although it had been obtained legally, in reality it was just as fake as the others — just as fake as the first eighteen years of her life had been…
The drive from Duke University to the little town of Wolf Trap in Fairfax County, Virginia, usually took Daria over four hours, but tonight she pushed her mom’s old BMW hard and did it in nearly three.
As she turned onto the wooded suburban road where she’d grown up, she wondered whether she was losing her mind. There was the stream she’d tried to dam up with rocks and branches when she was ten, there was tree she’d fallen from and broken her arm…
She recalled the pushy little man who, just hours ago, had claimed to be her uncle, and shuddered at the thought that he might intrude on this world.
The large brick Georgian house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac. No light shone from inside. With her parents abroad, the family house was only used these days as a place to gather for holidays.
And a place to keep records.
She opened the door, flipped on the lights in the long front foyer, and disabled the burglar alarm by typing in “Penguin”—the name of the rescue-shelter cat she’d picked out on her fifth birthday.
Everything was deceptively, comfortably normal — the Persian carpets, the pale yellow walls, the photos of her and her family on the walls. This was her home.
Still, she felt like an intruder as she climbed the steps to the second floor, taking care not to make too much noise.
Her parents’ bedroom was cavernous, thirty feet long and nearly as wide. On her mother’s side stood a tall antique armoire, made from gorgeous burled walnut.
She opened one of the lower drawers and found an expired membership card for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, her mother’s voter registration card, an expired driver’s license, and there, in the back, the card that Daria had remembered seeing years ago, when she’d retrieved her mother’s passport from the very same drawer. She hadn’t examined it closely back then, but she did now: It read American Red Cross Volunteer Blood Donor ID Card, and then it gave her mother’s name, and her blood type: AB.
Daria hung her head as she crumpled the card in her hand.
Three months ago, she had given blood at Duke as part of a freshman class blood drive and learned she was type O. And from the advanced placement biology course she’d taken as a senior in high school, she knew that an AB parent couldn’t have a type O child.
Unless, of course, that child had been adopted.
After staring dumbfounded at the card for several minutes, Daria lifted her head and noticed her old field hockey stick propped up in a corner of the room. She’d used it in the regional tournament her team had won last year. Her mom had wanted to frame it.
Without pausing to think, she stood up, retrieved the stick, settled on a good grip, then faced the wall where a framed studio photo of her and her alleged parents hung at eye level. Intellectually, she realized that they’d probably been the good guys. Certainly they’d cared for her as though she’d been their own for eighteen years.
But they’d also lied to her, and she was furious.