The Colonel's Mistake (7 page)

Decker approached a line of cabs—mostly old Russian-made Ladas—on Vurgun Street where it intersected with Nizami. He began to look inside each one, eliciting bored looks from the cigarette-smoking drivers who were lounging around next to their vehicles.

Mark, who was sitting in his Niva behind the line of cabs, tapped on his horn, but Decker didn’t notice. So he drove forward a few feet and rolled down his window.

“Need a ride?”

Decker waved him away without making eye contact.

Mark looked out his windshield for a moment, then said, “Buddy! Get in the damn car.”

This time Decker turned.

“I’m your contact,” said Mark quietly.

Decker’s eyes widened and he gave a significant nod of his chin. He climbed in the Niva, although it was a tight squeeze for him and his head nearly touched the ceiling. He offered his hand to Mark and in a serious, I’m-all-business tone, said, “Pleasure to meet you, sir.”

Mark ignored Decker’s hand—he needed both of his own to muscle the manual steering. On top of that he was irritable and worried about Peters and Daria.

He estimated that Decker was in his midtwenties. One more guy out of thousands drawn to Baku by the oil money, looking to cash in on his Navy SEAL experience. Only Mark thought Decker was too late. A decade ago Baku had been like the Wild West during
the gold rush. But the big security firms had long-since discovered Baku and taken over.

“You don’t look like a SEAL. You’re too big.” Six four, Mark guessed. And broad-shouldered. Guys the size of Decker were usually too slow and awkward to handle the training.

Decker screwed up his face a bit. “Are you always this friendly?”

“Are you armed?”

Decker lifted his pant legs, revealing a snub-nosed Glock holstered on one ankle and a five-inch double-bladed combat knife on the other.

Mark shrugged. “OK, John Decker. You’ll do. Let’s go find your protection detail.”

Peters’s apartment—the allegedly empty one he kept on Aslanov Street—was locked, but Mark had brought a couple of small lock-picking tools with him.

“Old-school. That’s pretty slick,” said Decker as Mark went to work. After a few minutes of watching Mark unsuccessfully try to pick the lock, he said, “You know they make electronic picks now. I trained on one a few years ago. They’re great.”

“That so?” said Mark.

“Yeah, you just stick it in and it does the work for you.”

“You got one now?”

“No, sir.”

“Then what’s your point?”

“Ah, no point I guess.”

After another minute the door swung open.

Mark, for one, wasn’t overly surprised at the state in which they found Leonard Peters. Even before discovering the body in the bathtub, he’d noted the scratch marks around the lock. Then there was the overturned ashtray in the living room and Peters’s ridiculous pipe—Mark always suspected Peters had fancied himself a bit of a Sherlock Holmes—broken in two on the living room floor.

It was a small apartment, but Peters evidently had started living there, for it had been furnished with care—supple leather couches from Turkey, a fancy espresso maker, dark blue curtains…The bed had been made. Other than the few things in the living room and kitchen that appeared to have been disturbed as the result of a struggle, nothing was out of order.

Mark went back into the bathroom and examined the body. Decker stood behind him, Glock drawn. There were gunshot wounds on Peters’s arms, but also precise shots to his head and chest, reminiscent of the clustering Mark had seen at the Trudeau House. The body rested in a seated position with one arm hanging over the side of the tub, like a modern-day
Death of Marat
.

Mark noted the purple livor mortis on the hand outside the tub. He squeezed it gently between his forefinger and thumb. Peters’s skin remained purple. The arm and fingers were stiff. He was no expert and he knew that estimating the time of death, especially in a stiflingly hot apartment, was a crapshoot in the best of circumstances. But he guessed Peters had been dead for around as long as the people at the Trudeau House.

“You better call your contact at the embassy.” Mark glanced at Decker.

“Yes, sir.”

But Decker didn’t move. His lips were pressed tightly together and he was breathing through his nose as he stared at Peters. Sweat glistened on his forehead. The air was hot, easily in the upper nineties. Behind Decker, sunlight streamed into the apartment through large sliding glass doors that led to a balcony. Mark had noticed a window-unit air conditioner in the living room, but it wasn’t on.

“Come on,” said Mark. “We’ve seen enough.”

Decker still didn’t move, so Mark turned around and grabbed his elbow. “Come on, buddy, let’s get some air.”

They retreated to the balcony, where Decker crouched down and cradled his big head in his big hands for a moment. “It’s just the heat,” he said.

“Compared to last week this is nothing.”

Decker took a deep breath. “I’ll call the embassy.”

“I think that’s a good idea.”

Just then Mark noticed an irritating flash of light, like an errant ray of sunshine, fixing on his eye. The next second he was rocketing sideways, tackled by Decker.

He blacked out momentarily. When he came to, Decker was on top of him.

The wind had been knocked out of his lungs, rendering him unable to speak. He tried to lift his hands up to Decker’s throat, intending to choke him, but Decker pushed them down.

“Keep below the wall.” Decker gestured with his chin to the waist-high brick parapet on the edge of the balcony.

Mark kept quiet until the excruciating pain gripping his chest subsided a bit. “Get the fuck off me.”

“Someone just took a shot at you, sir.”

“I said get off me!” The remains of Mark’s crushed reading glasses slipped out of his shirt pocket. He could smell lamb meat—probably from a
döner
kebab—on Decker’s breath.

“Check out the door,” said Decker.

Mark looked up and observed a tiny bullet hole right around where his head had been.

“I saw the red sight dot on your face.” Decker rolled off him but stayed below the balcony wall. “The bullet hit the far wall at about the same height it penetrated the glass. Judging from the angle, whoever took a shot at you has to be almost right across from us.”

That would be the Kura Araksvodstroi apartment complex, thought Mark, with a constricting feeling of dread and anger. A run-down 1950s-era Soviet behemoth, it was a veritable rabbit warren of dilapidated apartments. A shooter could hide for weeks in that building and never be found.

He looked at the sliding glass door again, just to confirm that he wasn’t going insane. The bullet hole was still there. He suddenly felt old. He wondered what underworld he’d let himself get sucked into, and how he could get the hell out.

They rolled into the apartment, keeping close to the ground. But when Decker went to open the door to the common hall, Mark blocked him silently with his hand.

He reminded himself that the carnage at the Trudeau House almost certainly hadn’t been inflicted by one person. Which meant the guy who’d just taken a shot at him was probably part of a team.

A few seconds later the door handle moved almost imperceptibly, as someone gently tried to twist it open. But Mark had locked the door behind him before entering the apartment, and now the lock engaged. He put a finger to his lips and gestured to the rear bedroom.

When he and Decker were behind the bedroom door, Mark whispered, “Your gun.”

“Screw that. I’m the protection.”

“That closet,” said Mark, pointing. “The wall inside it abuts the next apartment. Cut a hole and crawl through it. I’ll watch the door. Your gun. Now.”

Decker handed it over. Seconds later, there was a screeching sound as he used his knife to saw through the drywall.

From the crack he’d left in the open bedroom door, Mark had a clear view of Peters’s front door. He kept Decker’s pistol trained on it.

“I’m good, boss. Going through,” whispered Decker from the closet.

Then the front door popped open. A guy with a crowbar was pushed aside by two clean-shaven men who charged into the apartment with silenced assault rifles.

Mark scurried cockroach-like into the closet. Decker was already through the hole in the wall, on his belly in the bedroom of the adjacent apartment. They crawled on their knees through the kitchen and out into the common hall. At the end of the hall was a stairwell, which they descended four steps at a time.

“What are we talking for exits?” called Decker, in a loud whisper.

Mark pictured the building in his head. “A main one in the front, a small one in back, and a main one on the west side. East side, nothing.”

When they got to the second floor of the building, they tried doors to apartments on the east side until they found one that was open.

Decker ran past a woman holding a crying baby. As she screamed at him to get out, he raced to the open balcony and vaulted over the edge without even pausing. Mark followed in Decker’s footsteps, but when he got to the balcony himself, he hesitated. The drop was about fifteen feet.

“Lower yourself over the side.” Decker was standing unhurt on the pavement. A few pedestrians had stopped to gawk. “Relax as you fall, keep your knees bent, and roll on the ground if you need to.”

“Yeah, that’ll work,” said Mark, but he jumped anyway. Instead of rolling he hit with a sack-of-potatoes thud and wound up twisting his ankle. Decker pulled him up and they started to run.

Before the latest oil boom, Fountains Square had been where the prostitutes hung out, but now it was just an extension of the Nizami Street shopping bonanza. Well-tended flower gardens lay planted around the central fountains.

Mark stopped short in the center of the square. Bent over and panting, he rested his hands on his knees. A veiled woman in a black skin-tight T-shirt, skin-tight jeans, and high heels bumped into him. Mark eyed her—she was chatting on a cell phone, which made him suspicious, but decided he was just being paranoid.

His ankle was killing him and sweat dripped off his forehead. He noticed Decker, who had stopped beside him, wasn’t even breathing hard.

“I think we’re clear,” said Decker.

Mark wondered—had the shooter been waiting for them specifically, or had he just been watching the apartment to see who showed up? Because if the whole thing had been a chance encounter, then Mark figured he could risk going back to his apartment, back to his life. But if he’d been specifically marked, if they knew he was the former chief of station/Azerbaijan and had been helping Daria…

“You want to tell me what that was all about?” said Decker.

“I don’t know.”

Decker had been out on the balcony too, completely exposed, standing directly to his right. Had the shooter simply flipped a coin when deciding who to go after first? Or had he, Mark, been the primary target?

Mark considered the laser sight, the lookout point in the Kura Araksvaodstroi apartment block, and everything he’d seen at the Trudeau House. It all pointed to a disturbingly high level of professionalism and planning. But any professional worth his salt would have tried to take out Decker first. Then he would have gone after the weak guy.

But the shooter hadn’t done that. Which meant he’d been specifically targeted.

Mark took a minute to catch his breath. As station chief he’d spent all his time behind a desk. The last time he’d been in the field was six years ago. “Listen, I need to take off but I want to thank you for what you did back—”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m perfectly cognizant of the fact that you saved—”

“If you need me, I’m available. I can help. You’re CIA, aren’t you?”

“Who said that?”

“One of the embassy marines. He was just guessing.”

“I don’t work for the government anymore,” said Mark. “The best thing you can do for yourself is to get back to the embassy, tell them what happened, and then hop on the first plane out of town. It’s possible you’re a target now too.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Evidently.”

“And I need the work.”

Mark remembered the speed with which Decker had reacted on Peters’s balcony. After taking a moment to think, he said, “You’re way too young to have retired from the SEALs. Why’d you leave?”