Death of a Spy by Dan Mayland Page B

possible between their personal lives, and their lives—both past and present—in the intelligence underworld.
    When it came to communications, even when they both took precautions, they could never be certain those communications weren’t being traced. So when Mark was on a job, radio silence with home was the rule.
    “I know the drill,” said Daria.

19
    Baku, Azerbaijan
The next day

    Baku was booming.
    The main airport terminal, which Mark blazed through on his way to the line of cabs out front, was completely new, all flashy curves and gleaming steel and glass—it was three times the size of the old one he’d passed through when he’d been kicked out of the country. The road from the airport, instead of the chaotic potholed mess that it had been just a few years ago, was now an eight-lane, newly paved modern highway that his cab driver navigated at speeds approaching a hundred miles an hour—because he’d been promised a two hundred dollar tip if Mark arrived at the embassy in time for an important meeting. As Mark watched for cars that might be following him—he doubted many could keep up—he observed that the highway was lined with thousands of decorative street lamps, each one of which he guessed cost more than the average Azeri made in a year.
    The boom, fueled by massive amounts of oil money, had already been well under way when Mark had gotten the boot, but it still surprised him to see—good Lord, there was even a Trump Tower—how much had changed in the time he’d been gone.
    One thing that hadn’t, however, was the US embassy on Azadliq Prospect. Constructed during Baku’s first oil boom over a century earlier, before the Soviets had driven the Azeri oil industry into the ground, the building itself was grand—much nicer than the nuclear-bunker fortress-embassy that the US had built in Bishkek—but it was set behind high walls, and the utilitarian green-metal entrance door that one needed to pass through to get to it was reminiscent of an underfunded prison.
    As Mark jogged up to the entrance, he thought, and not for the first time, would it kill the State Department to slap a fresh coat of paint on the entrance door, and paste up a sign that said something cheerful? W ELCOME TO THE E MBASSY OF THE U NITED S TATES OF A MERICA! W E ’ RE GLAD YOU CAME TO VISIT! Because for a lot of people, that grungy door was all they’d ever see of the United States.
    At a little guard shack, Mark encountered security checkpoints manned by armed Azeris in blue uniforms. He noted the electric wiring in the little shack was still a mess—the circuit panel still lacked a cover—and the metal detector was the same ancient model that had been there for as long as he could remember.
    He handed over his new passport, the one that the US embassy in Tbilisi had brought him, courtesy of Kaufman, just before he’d boarded his flight for Istanbul; it was brown, marking him as a US citizen engaged in official US business.
    “Cell phone?” asked the guard, pointing to Mark’s shoulder bag. “Laptop?”
    “I’m keeping them. Call for approval.”
    Civilians were required to turn over all electronics, but not people who worked at the embassy.
    “You have an appointment?”
    “With Roger Davis.”
    Officially, Davis was the embassy’s political counselor; unofficially, he was the CIA’s chief of station/Azerbaijan.

    Permission to bring electronics into the embassy was denied, so Mark handed over Larry’s laptop and camera, along with his own phone, iPad, two charging cords, and an adapter for the iPad that allowed him to connect it to other devices;; in return, the guard gave him a laminated ticket with the number three on it.
    A student intern met him at the marine guard checkpoint inside the main embassy building, but instead of bringing him to Davis, she ushered him to the pleasantly cluttered office of the public affairs officer and told him to wait.
    He didn’t mind the first half hour. Baku was nine