“Why not?”
Daria told him about her uncle’s revelation. “I was a normal kid back then, Mark. I had a boyfriend, I thought I was going to be a doctor…” As they reached an intersection and waited for a break in the traffic, her eyes closed for a brief moment, as though she were hoping to transport herself back to that time of innocence. “I wasn’t like I am now…”
“You’re telling me that’s why Campbell and Peters and everyone at the Trudeau House were killed?”
“I don’t need your sarcasm.”
“I don’t have time for bullshit.”
She glowered at him.
“Say what you have to say, Daria. Just get it out.”
“Fine. My real mom was murdered. End of story. Don’t worry, I won’t waste any more of your damn time.”
“Who did it?”
“The mullahs. In 1979, during the revolution.”
“Why?”
“Because she and her family backed sane people during the revolution and—”
“The National Front?”
“Yeah.”
“I was with my mom when it happened, in our home.”
“Why didn’t you tell the CIA this?”
“After it happened, a neighbor took me to the US embassy and dumped me on the first American she saw heading for the entrance. She told him he needed to find this piece of shit Derek Simpson and make him take responsibility.”
“Whoa, back up. Who’s Derek Simpson?”
“The guy who got my mom pregnant. My real father.”
“He worked at the embassy?”
“Yeah. He’d dated my mom for like half a year, everybody knew him, but he ditched her right after she told him she was pregnant. I was a mistake.”
“Nice guy.”
“He could have helped her. He could have helped me. Instead he ran. Anyway, the guy I got dumped on was a diplomat named John Buckingham—”
“Who told you all this? Your uncle?”
“He and his Iranian wife never even officially adopted me, they just brought me to America after the hostage crisis hit, claimed me as their own, and filed for a birth certificate. Yeah, my uncle told me most of it.”
Mark just shook his head. He didn’t know what any of this had to do with the current mess, but it was clear she was up to her neck in old grievances and abominations. It didn’t bode well for her, he knew. Or for him. She stopped walking and turned to face him. They stood in the middle of a garbage-strewn alley.
“Did you ever confront your adoptive parents?”
“Oh yeah. They admitted everything. They even said they’d tried hard to find Derek Simpson, both in Iran and back in the States. But it was like the guy had never existed. The embassy wouldn’t even acknowledge that he’d worked there.”
“Was he CIA?” said Mark.
“Probably.”
Daria looked down at her feet for a moment, then pulled her chador tightly to her chest.
“How’d you take the news?” asked Mark.
“How do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“I made peace with my parents but I was still furious — at the mullahs for killing my mother and at my father for what he did to my mom. I wanted to do something to make things right.”
Out of the corner of his eye Mark saw Tural approaching.
“Why have we stopped walking?”
“After the revolution my uncle joined the MEK — that’s how he found out what really happened to my mother, because he had access to MEK spies in the Revolutionary Guard. Anyway, I told him I wanted to join too. He said I was too young, but I kept bugging him and eventually he suggested that as an American citizen I might be more useful in another capacity.”
“Working for the CIA.”
“The MEK wanted someone on the inside, someone who could let them know what America was really up to. So I studied Farsi and international law. I practiced taking polygraph tests. It worked. I applied to the CIA and was accepted.” She paused before saying, “That’s it. Now you know. Kaufman was right — you shouldn’t have trusted me. I’m sorry I used you. I’m sorry for everything.”
Mark considered how oblivious he’d been, how easy he’d been to fool. “Did you ever sell out any of your CIA agents?”
“No, never. I just had multiple loyalties, that’s all.”
“Multiple loyalties,” Mark repeated, remembering the slaughter at the Trudeau House. Treason was another word for it.
“You know as well as I do that I gave the Agency a lot of good information.” Daria jabbed a finger at him. “Information I would never have been able to get if it hadn’t been for my relationship with the MEK. And the MEK and the CIA both want to take down the mullahs. They should be working together anyway. It’s stupid that they’re not.”
Mark said, “You have ties to the CIA and MEK, and both were hit. The attacks have some connection to you, Daria.”
“But I don’t know what the connection is. Nor do I know why Campbell was killed. Or why someone tried to kill you.”
“But you still know a lot more than you’re telling me, don’t you?”
This time Daria didn’t even try to lie.
By now Tural had reached them. Mark stepped back a foot, prepared to defend himself, but Tural breezed by him on his way to a beat-up Russian version of a Vespa motor scooter. It was parked in front of a run-down hotel that catered to Iranian men looking for cheap sex just over the border—Love Rooms read a sign in Farsi. Tural hopped on the scooter and Daria took a seat behind him.
“I can’t just let you just go,” said Mark.
Daria turned so that she was facing him. Her face was contorted into an expression that fell somewhere between despair and rage. Her chador slipped open, and she gripped the handle of the pistol, holding it so tightly that Mark worried she was going to inadvertently shoot herself. She didn’t point it at him, but said, “You don’t have a fucking choice.”
35
Mark stuck a new SIM card in his phone and called Decker.
“They just took off. Watch the road leading back out of town. She’s probably headed for the mountains and that’s the only way to get there.”
He jogged back to his Lada, which was still parked by the café. As he started driving out of town, Decker called back.
“They just passed me. They’re now in a black Land Cruiser, an old beater with a roof rack.”
“They see you?”
“No way. I haven’t even pulled out yet.”
“Follow them, but stay far back. I’ll be coming up behind you.”
A few minutes later, Decker called again to say that the Land Cruiser had turned left onto a dirt road.
“I see it and I see you. Fall off, I’ll lead from here.”
The road was a muddy and rutted disaster. Mark’s Lada labored through enormous potholes and up sharp inclines as it tackled the foothills of the Talysh Mountains, where thick hardwood forests grew between citrus groves and fields planted with tobacco and tea leaves.
Little private roads frequently branched off, leading to farmhouses with sedge-grass roofs. And unlike the relatively straight coastal highway, where sight lines of a half mile or more were common, this road twisted and turned, rendering Mark’s binoculars useless. Which meant that, once he caught up to the Land Cruiser, he had no choice but to stay close behind, sometimes within a couple hundred yards.
36
“I think someone’s following us,” said Tural, sounding a little panicky.
He’d been staring intently out the back window for the last minute.
“The gray Lada.” Daria glanced at the rearview mirror. She’d insisted on driving, given how agitated Tural was.
“You’ve seen it?”
She had — several times on the more open stretches of road. “It’s a common car.”