The Colonel's Mistake (15 page)

“Disgusting.” She picked up the basket and moved it down the table.

She was about to turn her attention back to Tural when she stopped herself, sensing that something wasn’t right. So she picked up the basket again, this time assessing its weight.

“What are you doing?” asked Tural.

Daria removed the rest of the bread, and then the checkered napkin, revealing a cell phone. It was open and on. And she recognized it.

“Mark! Where are you!”

“Stay hidden,” Mark told Decker.

He stood up. After a few moments, Daria began marching toward him across the gray sand beach. They converged in a barren area between the café and the ruined Ferris wheel.

“Working with the MEK behind the CIA’s back? Nice, Daria. Really nice.”

The MEK, short for Mojahedin-e Khalq, was an armed Iranian resistance group that had been trying for decades to get rid of the Islamic regime in Iran.

“You don’t know you’re talking about.”

“Your buddy Tural used the word
masoul
. A
masoul
is an MEK supervisor. You were the one who briefed me on it. Remember that?”

“Then you should know I was looking to recruit agents from them,” she shot back. “To get information for the CIA. Which is to say, to do my job.”

They were staring each other down but keeping their distance.

“How did you find me?” she said.

“I followed you, how else?”

“You were sleeping when I left.”

“Evidently not.”

“I would have seen you.”

“You didn’t. You know why?”

Daria declined to speculate.

“Because I’m damn good at tailing people.” Mark hoped the binoculars on his chest would distract her from considering the possibility that he’d had help from Decker, who’d rented a second car in Baku. The fact was, she should have spotted at least one of them. It had been poor countersurveillance work on her part that had allowed them to go undetected for so long.

She looked at him as though he were the one who’d betrayed her.

Mark said, “Was that an MEK safe house that was hit?”

“Yeah. With people in it.”

“It’s not a coincidence that this MEK cell was taken out around the same time as the Baku station.”

“No shit. But I don’t know how they’re related. Yet.”

“Why did you come down here now?”

“For the same reason I talked to my agents in Baku last night—to try to find out why Campbell was assassinated.” A tone of exasperation crept into Daria’s voice. “If the Iranians killed him, the MEK might know something about it through their sources in Iran.”

“And that’s why you want to talk to this guy Yaver?”

“Yeah. He was second in command of the cell that got hit and now he’s the leader. And you know what? If you’re hanging around, he’s not going to talk to me. And if the guy waiting for me now suspects I’m in league with you—”

“That would be Tural?”

“—he won’t even take me to Yaver.”

“Get ready, I’m going to push you.”

Mark suddenly sprang into Daria and shoved her hard, so that she fell backward on the sand.

She looked up at him, shaken. “What the fuck is the matter with you!”

“If you’re armed, get out your gun now and point it at me.”

Daria didn’t need much prompting on that account. She lifted up her chador, pulled out a small pistol from between her jeans and her waist, and pointed it at Mark’s chest.

“Tural is coming up behind you,” said Mark. “Tell him to back off.”

“Up yours.”

“I pushed you so he won’t think we’re working together, Daria.”

“We’re not.”

But Daria stood and gestured for Tural to back off, which he did. She kept the gun pointed at Mark. Her arm was shaking a bit.

“I saw you crying outside that MEK building. You cared a lot about those people who died. They weren’t just agents you were running.”

“Don’t go there.”

“You know, Daria, after I found out Logan was dead, I called Kaufman. I told him what had happened and that you were in trouble and that he damn well needed to help get you out of Gobustan before you wound up dead too. You know what he said?” Daria just stared at him. “He said he didn’t trust you. He even thought maybe you had something to do with Campbell’s death.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“The reason he didn’t trust you is because you’re half-Iranian. I told him to go stuff it—that you were one of my best officers and that I believed in you. And when it was clear that Kaufman wasn’t going to bend over backward to get you out of Gobustan, I did it myself by cutting a deal with Orkhan.”

“I didn’t ask you to do all that.”

“Kaufman would have let you die there. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

From the pained look on her face, Mark could see the guilt trip he was serving up was having the desired effect.

“What do you want from me, Mark?” She sounded weary.

“The truth.”

“And then you’ll leave?”

Mark pretended to consider her proposition. She really didn’t know him that well, he concluded. “OK. You have my word on that.”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“I’m not expecting I will.”

“I’m not who you think I am. You should have listened to Kaufman.”

“Get on with it, Daria.”

“I need to talk to Tural first. He’s freaking. Wait here.”

“I gotta take a leak, but I’ll be right back. Hey, how would you feel about giving me my phone back?”

“You’ve got to be—”

“Please.”

She threw up her hands as she walked away.

Mark swung by the Ferris wheel.

“How’d it go?” asked Decker, who’d remained hidden behind it. “You guys patch things up?”

“Ah, I’d say we still have a few outstanding issues to work through.” Mark crouched behind the metal axle tower and lifted his binoculars to his eyes. As he watched Daria argue with Tural, he explained about how Daria had been two-timing the CIA and secretly sending information to the MEK.

“Who the hell is the MEK?”

“Iranian opposition group, trying to overthrow the regime in Iran.”

“So, they’re the good guys?”

“Kind of. Not really. You remember the Shah?”

“The who?”

“The Shah of Iran, guy who used to rule Iran.”

“Oh, yeah. Him.”

Not convinced that Decker really knew who the Shah was, Mark said, “He got overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini in ’79?”

“You know, I was born in the eighties.”

“Anyway, the MEK started out trying to kick the Shah and the US out of Iran. They killed a few Americans and supported the Iranian revolution at first, but then they broke with Khomeini and
thousands were executed. Now they claim to support democracy, but they have jack for support among regular Iranians and the organization is run like a militant personality cult. You ask me, the mullahs in Iran and the MEK deserve each other. They’re both fucking nuts. Daria’s gonna be back soon, I gotta blow.”

“She know I’m here?”

“I suggested I was just good at following her. Don’t know if she bought it or not. Get back to your car, wait for me to call.”

Daria handed Mark his cell phone.

“Hey, thanks.”

“Walk with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“What do you know about my mother?”

Mark ran a few steps through the sand to catch up to her. “She had to leave Iran right after the revolution, because she was married to an American diplomat. Lives in DC and Geneva now.”

“Wrong.”

“What does this have to do with Campbell’s assassination?”

“I was adopted as a child.”

“That wasn’t in your file.” Mark glanced behind him and saw Tural was following them. “Where are we going, Daria?”

“The mother you read about in my file isn’t my birth mother, she was the woman who adopted me.”

“The Agency checks these things—it would have come up.”

They reached the street. Daria didn’t even break stride as she crossed the line of trucks waiting to enter Iran. She was headed west, toward the center of town.

“Well, it didn’t.”

“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.”