The Colonel's Mistake (34 page)

After a couple of minutes he pissed himself, and then he passed out. He woke up to one of the Iranian soldiers punching his stomach.

Amato said, “You shared information about the uranium with people you trusted in Dubai, as a backup in case one of you was ever captured. What are their names?”

Mark tried to think the way Daria was thinking, but it was hard for him to think at all given the intense, mind-numbing pain he felt in his gut and chest. He wondered whether one of his broken ribs had punctured a lung.

Had she given them Bowlan’s name? Or had she just made up names? Mark didn’t want to mention Bowlan.

He made up two names.

“Wrong answer,” said the Iranian interrogator.

Daria was held under for a long, long time. And then, after Mark gave them Bowlan’s name, it was his turn again. And then Daria’s…

Mark was beginning to lose hope when he heard the sound of gunshots coming from outside the building.

One of the soldiers in the interrogation room received a call on his radio. As he held the handset to his ear the staccato bursts of gunfire outside grew louder. After a moment he clipped the radio back to his belt and ran out with two other soldiers following on his heels. One soldier stayed behind with the Iranian interrogator. Daria and Mark were left strapped to the benches.

Amato faced the interrogator. “What’s happening?”

The dispassionate calm the interrogator had projected during the interrogation was gone. Now he looked a little frightened. “I don’t know.”

Amato pulled out his pistol and turned to face the hallway, as though preparing to fend off an armed assault. The interrogator had drawn a pistol as well. “How many men do we have in the building?” Amato asked.

The interrogator looked unsure of whether to answer. “Eight, I think, maybe ten more nearby.”

Amato gestured to the remaining Iranian soldier, who was pointing his assault rifle at Daria and Mark. “Tell him to cover the back hall. You guard the prisoners. I’ll cover the front exit.”

The interrogator hesitated but then issued the order. As soon as the soldier with the assault rifle turned his back, Amato raised his gun and shot him in the head. A half second later, he shot the interrogator in the face.

Amato bound over to the interrogator and fired one more shot, at close range, directly into the man’s forehead. He did the same to the downed Iranian soldier and then holstered his pistol and raced over to Daria. Without saying a word he worked frantically to release her restraints.

Some of the buckles were under the bench and hard to release. Amato briefly ducked his head beneath the water.

Mark heard more shots from outside, and screams. He kept one eye on the two exits leading out from the room and one eye on Daria.

Amato finally got her free. His suit was sagging on his bulky frame and the fat around his gut was visible where his dress shirt was plastered to his skin. “Follow me,” he said to her.

She just lay there, so he began to raise her up.

What happened next flashed by so quickly that Mark, who was still trying to watch the exits, barely saw it from the corner of his eye.

One second Daria was deadweight, and the next she’d slammed her knee into Amato’s crotch and was going for his gun. Amato barely caught her hand as she tried to yank the gun out of its holster.

“For the love of God, girl, I’m—”

At that moment an Iranian soldier with an AK-47 appeared. The compound was under assault, he roared, and orders had been given to execute the prisoners and evacuate. With the butt of his AK-47 pressed to his shoulder and his finger on the trigger, he ordered Amato to step back.

Instead Amato wrenched his pistol from Daria’s hands and placed his body between her and the Iranian.

Three bullets ripped through Amato’s chest. He kept standing long enough, however, to fire off a single shot in return.

As he slumped to his knees, Colonel Henry Amato’s mind flashed back to a moment in time over thirty years ago, in downtown Tehran. He was on Taleqani Avenue, just outside the US embassy. A black Volkswagen Beetle with a dented fender screeched to a stop a few feet in front of him. An old woman in a black chador slipped out. She had leathery, sunbaked skin and a dowager’s hump.

“Mr. Simpson! Mr. Simpson!”

He kept walking at a fast clip, as though he hadn’t heard, but the old woman was nimble and managed to glide directly in front of him on the crowded street. As she walked backward, keeping step with him, she opened her robe to reveal a little girl swaddled tightly in a green blanket.

The image in Amato’s mind was clearer now than it had been that day.

He’d only glanced at the baby for a moment, just long enough to look into her miniature brown eyes and notice the little wisps of dark hair poking out from underneath a white knitted cap trimmed in pink. But in the decades that followed he’d tried to re-create those eyes and every other detail of that day, as if by doing so he could somehow go back and change what had happened.

Because not taking his daughter in his arms that day, not caring for her and loving her when she’d needed him most, had been the biggest mistake of his life.

“You know who she is!” called the old woman. “You must take her, take her to America!”

She followed him all the way down the street, calling out to him again and again, trying to thrust the child into his arms, until he ducked into a cab and slammed the door in her face.

With one hand the woman held the baby girl and with the other she banged on the back window of the cab. “Cursed are those who hold back the small kindness! If you cannot care for her, find her a home! Take her I say! Her mother is dead!”

Cursed are those who hold back the small kindness…

It was as if the old neighbor woman was still yelling those words in his ear.

Minutes later she’d dropped the baby girl into the hands of a dumbfounded embassy worker, insisting that he—that the American government!—force Derek Simpson to take responsibility for the life he’d helped create.

He never had.

Amato opened his eyes and saw bleak concrete walls and dirty water. He suddenly realized he was going to die in this hellhole, within seconds. To have even a chance at salvation he needed to ask God for forgiveness. Now, for what he had done to his daughter—it was a mortal sin—and across all these long years it had gone unconfessed.

Then he looked at Daria standing above him. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused. But they were the same eyes he had seen all those years ago.

“Save her!” he called out, pleading to his God not for his own salvation but for hers.

His voice came out as a gurgled, inaudible whisper.

“Save her!”

Amato wobbled on his knees in front of Daria, looking old and sad and beaten. The Iranian soldier he’d shot in the chest collapsed against the far wall.

Daria was shaking, a thin reed, looking as though the energy she’d just expended fighting Amato was the last ounce she’d had in her. Her eyes, heavy-lidded, slowly scanned the room.

More gunshots erupted from another part of the building. Amato crumpled into himself and then his head dipped underwater.

“Daria,” said Mark. “I’m over here.”

She turned and made eye contact with him for the first time.

“We’re getting out of here,” he said.

Daria approached. She was shaky on her feet and her right arm was deformed. Mark had the sense that a light breeze would blow her away. Her face, and the damage that had been done to it, filled him with a sense of blinding despair.

“Can you untie me?” he asked.

Daria nodded, but then she didn’t move. Whether it was drugs or trauma or some combination of the two, she was hanging onto consciousness by a thread.

“You can do this,” he said.

Daria looked at him again and Mark nodded at her. “We’re almost home.”

She walked a few steps, knelt down in the water next to him, and then tried to release the straps that bound him. But she was incapable of loosening the buckles with her left hand alone and when she tried to use her right, her face contorted into a look that was part anguish, part exhaustion. Her fingers wouldn’t move, the arm was too broken.

“I can’t,” she whispered, “I can’t…”

Mark felt her good hand brush up next to his bound wrists, beneath the bench. He took her hand between his palms and said, “Stop trying.”

Daria let her head rest on his chest. He could feel the warmth of her cheek on his bare skin.

A minute passed. In the hallway gunshots rang out and then a voice. “Mark! Are you there! Mark!”

“I’ve got her!”

Seconds later John Decker appeared, dressed in full battle gear and gripping a machine gun.

“Oh man,” he said as soon as he saw them. At first Mark thought Decker was reacting to what had been done to Daria, but then he realized that Daria’s face was turned and that Decker was really looking at him.

“I’m OK,” said Mark. “She’s not.”

Daria didn’t move while Decker untied him. Her head was still on his chest, her eyes closed. Decker was about to lift her to his shoulder but Mark said, “I’ll take her. You guide us out. Give me your pistol.”

Decker unholstered the 9mm Glock at his waist and handed it over butt-first. Mark sat up with Daria and fired twice into the chest of the Iranian soldier that Amato had shot, having noticed the man was still breathing.

“Let’s blow, boss, we got a boat outside.”

Mark carried Daria in his arms as he slogged through the water after Decker. Near the exit they passed the bodies of several fallen Iranians who were bleeding into the dirty water, tinting it red.

Outside it had started to rain. Mark blinked for a moment before he saw the seven unmarked Soviet-era landing craft—the same kind of old boats that regularly delivered supplies to the outposts on Neft Dashlari. Azeri soldiers were wading in the water and standing on the boats and guarding the nearby stilt roads.

Mark staggered toward the closest boat, still carrying Daria, and collapsed in the back.

Baku, Two Weeks Later

Mark glanced into his spare bedroom. Daria lay sleeping beneath yellow cotton sheets. On a table next to the bed, in a clear vase, stood a tall bouquet of white gladioli. It was eight in the morning. Rays of bright sunlight slipped through gaps in the window curtains.

They’d arrived at his apartment the day before, after having spent the past week in hiding at a house north of Baku, guarded round the clock by Orkhan’s men. Western-educated doctors had tended to Daria’s recovery, including a plastic surgeon and orthopedist that Mark had arranged to have secretly flown in from Paris. Which, to his dismay, had taken care of the rest of his CIA money and then some.

As she healed, Mark had focused on confirming his theory that Colonel Henry Amato had been Daria’s birth father.

His first step had been to threaten to go public with what he knew about what Amato and Ellis had been up to. In exchange for keeping his mouth shut, the director of national intelligence had allowed him access to all of Colonel Amato’s records.

Whereupon Mark learned that Amato had never even been CIA.

He’d started his career as an infantry grunt in Vietnam, had switched over to Army Intelligence after the war, and in the late 1970s had been assigned to an intelligence unit in Tehran commanded by Jack Campbell. His mission had been to infiltrate a prominent Iranian family with ties to the National Front, a group opposed to Khomeini’s Islamic revolution. Evidently the way Amato had tried to infiltrate this family had been by developing a relationship with the twenty-five-year-old daughter of the family patriarch.