The marine didn’t respond to Mark’s patronizing tone but he picked up the phone again.
A few minutes later a heavyset, plain-faced woman emerged from the embassy. They met in the courtyard in front of the building.
“Thanks for coming down, Vicky,” he said to her. “I know it must be chaos up there.”
“What do you need?” She sounded frustrated. And dead tired.
“For you to put me in touch with Logan.”
“I can’t.”
Mark knew that Logan carried a beeper twenty-four hours a day. A chief of station was always accessible, which was a part of the reason why Mark had left. In the old days, he might have had contact with Washington once a day or so, sometimes even once a week. But now, with e-mail and videoconferencing, it was like Washington practically ran the station.
Mark figured Vicky was just giving him the brush-off because she and Logan were busy beyond belief trying to deal with Washington and didn’t want him complicating matters.
“Listen, I don’t care how you do it, or who you wake up, or what Logan told you to tell me. I’ve got to talk to him. I have information about one of his officers that he needs to know. It’s important. It has to do with Campbell.”
“You don’t understand, Mark. I’ve been trying to reach him all night. He’s not calling in. The whole seventh floor is pissed to hell,” she said, referring to senior management in Washington, DC.
“You’ve tried the direct line to his apartment?”
“Of course.”
Mark studied her face again. Maybe it wasn’t fatigue that was getting to her. Maybe it was worry. “Is there any reason he’d be AWOL?”
“Sometimes he forgets to turn on his beeper. He might not even know what happened.”
“You try the Trudeau House?”
“Four times. No one’s answering.”
“The main crew usually doesn’t get there until seven thirty.”
“I know. That’s when I’m planning on calling for the fifth time.”
Mark envisioned Daria sitting out in Gobustan Prison. He didn’t think the Azeris would be too rough with her, especially if his visit made them think she had ties to the CIA. But still, there was that wide, pretty mouth and damn-near-perfect skin…Her American mutt genes had mixed with Iranian genes in a way that was undeniably attractive. It was one of the reasons, in addition to being bright and too driven for her own good, that she’d been able to recruit so many male agents.
She would be a temptation. The sooner Logan started working her case, the better.
“I’ll go by,” said Mark. “One of the morning crew might know where he is.”
5
The colonel lowered his head and began to speak the Lord’s Prayer. Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum…
After finishing, he looked up at the candles flickering near the empty white-marble altar, hoping for a sign. Eventually his knees began to ache.
The moral law prohibits exposing someone to mortal danger without grave reason, as well as refusing assistance to a person in danger.
He mumbled the words from the catechism in the dim light.
Grave reason, grave reason…that was the crux of it. There had been no grave reason for Daria to be exposed to mortal danger. To refuse to assist her now would be a mortal sin.
But he had already tried, and failed, to assist her. He’d sent Campbell.
There were other options. But if those options meant prolonging the life of the Iranian regime, would he not be committing another mortal sin of sorts?
The defense of the common good requires that an unjust aggressor be rendered unable to cause harm.
The colonel made the sign of the cross and touched his forehead to the back of the wooden pew in front of him.
He wished it were Sunday morning. The sound of the priest at the altar, facing away from the congregation as he spoke the same words in Latin that had been intoned for centuries — words that were uncorrupted by modern, watered-down notions of good and evil — was always a comfort to him. He only attended the old Latin masses now, the Tridentine ceremonies that reminded him of when he used to sit in the pews between his mother and father, all three of them hungry from skipping breakfast so that when they knelt to receive communion they could do so with a clear conscience.
The colonel looked at his watch. In an hour he would need to be at the White House. In the meantime, he would keep praying for guidance.
6
Mark hailed a cab and got dropped off near the crenellated walls of medieval Baku. At a street-level Turkish breakfast buffet, he bought a round piece of simit bread and black tea to go.
A short walk brought him to a 125-year-old limestone mansion. Covered in gnarled grapevines and topped with gargoyles, it was a relic of Baku’s first oil-boom years, when rich Europeans like the Nobels and the Rothschilds had developed the oil fields in and around the city. Following the Cold War, the mansion had proved attractive to the CIA because after seventy years of vodka-swilling Russians using it as an overcrowded tenement house, no one had questioned the need to completely gut the place — making it easy for the Agency to install all the surveillance and security equipment that was needed.
Mark pushed the button on the intercom to the left of the brass plate that read Trudeau House International, Inc., allegedly a financial services company run by expatriate Canadians.
He’d get in and get out, he thought as he tapped his foot impatiently, taking a swig of tea and looking up at one of the gargoyles, a smiling chimera.
It was seven thirty. By eight thirty, he figured, he could be back at his apartment. He wouldn’t get much sleep, but if he pounded enough Turkish coffee this afternoon he’d be able to get some work done.
As he waited for a response, he wondered if the place had changed much since he’d left. He remembered a large oak receptionist’s desk in the entrance hall and well-appointed offices where the Trudeau House’s clients — mainly Azeris with newfound oil wealth and connections to the upper echelons of government — were wooed with excellent CIA-subsidized investment returns. The upper levels housed five additional offices that had sat vacant, waiting for operations officers who had been expected but had never arrived.
Mark felt a spike in his anxiety level until he reminded himself that he’d left all that political crap behind. He’d changed since quitting the Agency, he thought, and for the better. Teaching college kids about international relations, building a sand castle on the beach with a kid and his mom — those were the kinds of things that were important to him now.
No one responded to the intercom. He pushed the button again and waited, for longer this time. Again, nothing. Someone should have been there by now, asking politely what the hell he wanted. Unless standards had really slipped under Logan, which Mark thought probable.
He rang one more time and then walked to the end of the block. He turned right, then right again, down an alley that ran behind the Trudeau House and a series of adjacent buildings. He stopped at a steel door that had a small keypad above the knob. The security codes were changed on a weekly basis, but he’d helped implement the system and knew an override code that had worked in the past.
He typed in the code, opened the door, and descended a flight of stairs into a bare basement with a low ceiling and a stained but clean concrete floor. At the far end of the room stood another steel door. He typed in a second override code and this door opened as well.