Spy for Hire (15 page)

“What, do they expect you to fly back to New York just for a first interview?”

“I don’t know what they expect. All they said was to contact them when I’m back in the States, so maybe something will come of it eventually. How was your day?”

“It’s just started. It’s morning here, remember? I figured I’d call before it got too late there.”

“Oh, yeah. Sorry, I thought it was later. How was yesterday?”

As his fiancée chattered away, Rad watched in horror as his rickshaw driver passed within a foot of a cluster of women standing over hot vats of road tar. The smoky wood fires under the vats looked eerie in the shadows of the night. Nearby, two other women were digging out a pothole with a single shovel—one of the women gripped the shaft of the shovel, while the other held on to a rope tied to the shovel handle. By the side of the road, women were using hammers to break big rocks into little rocks. Two men who looked like supervisors were standing around doing nothing.

I gotta get out of here, Rad thought.

An orange Tata truck a few feet in front of him spewed a toxic black plume of exhaust into his face. The back of the truck had been painted with bloodred flowers and decorated with strings of shiny beads that were dancing maniacally all around. Everyone was honking their horns.

A few minutes later the rickshaw stopped in front of a three-story, turn-of-the-century British mansion that sat behind a tall wrought-iron fence. The driver announced that they had reached their destination.

“Listen,” said Rad, interrupting his fiancée. “I gotta go. They’re waiting for me inside. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“OK. Enjoy your dinner.”

“It’s gonna suck.”

“Love you. Miss you.”

“Love you too, hon.”

Rad Saveljic eyed the salad on his plate with suspicion. Rule number one when traveling—
don’t eat uncooked greens
. He’d learned that lesson the hard way on a three-day trip to Mexico with his fiancée the year before.

But he was in the home of an Indian member of Parliament. And this MP in particular was a powerful man, with ties to many of the local construction firms. If BP wanted their new offices in Delhi to get built within the next hundred years, they needed the MP on their side. Also, it was a late dinner—Rad was used to eating at seven—so he was starving.

Which is why, instead of pushing his plate away, he reluctantly lowered his fork, skewered a fresh tomato slathered with a dressing he didn’t recognize, smiled, and said, “Looks great.”

Several of the other guests, including Rad’s boss at BP—a fifty-year-old American of Indian descent—concurred and for the next five minutes the room was filled with the sound of silver clinking and people making small talk.

Rad figured they would get down to business after dinner. That was when his boss would bring up what the MP might want in return for helping to smooth the way for the office development BP wanted to build in downtown Delhi. It would be a pretty basic pay-to-play deal, he was sure. Nothing Rad hadn’t seen, and even helped negotiate, dozens of times while helping his father manage and expand his gas stations in New Jersey. You buttered up the right people, then you got whatever permit, or waiver from the department of environmental protection, you needed.

“Ah, a vindaloo!” exclaimed Rad’s boss as a woman in a sari brought out a big steaming pot of what looked to Rad like a stew. Next came a pot of beef curry, followed by a plate of tandoori chicken.

“Wow, this all smells so delicious,” said Rad. As people began serving themselves, he ventured to ask, “Is one of the dishes less spicy than the others?”

“Oh, the vindaloo is not spicy at all,” said the MP. “I would suggest it to you.”

So Rad scooped a healthy portion of the vindaloo onto his plate. A minute later, he took a big bite of something he thought was pork.

The pain started in his mouth, but then radiated up to his eyes and into the back of his head. His throat burned and started to constrict involuntarily. For a second, he worried he might pass out.

He grabbed for his glass of water, and downed half of it, but that almost seemed to make things worse, so he grabbed a piece of the naan bread and stuffed it in his mouth.

“You like the vindaloo?” asked the MP.

Rad held up a finger as he tried to compose himself. Twenty seconds later, in a low croak that could barely be heard over the laughter that had erupted at the table, he said, “Delicious, but a bit spicier than I expected.”

“Rad’s still getting used to the ways of the subcontinent,” Rad’s boss explained. He gave Rad a patronizing pat on the shoulder.

Rad’s eyes were watering. He heard more laughter. In the center of the table, a lit candle, in the shape of a lotus blossom, floated in a brass bowl that had been filled with water. The candle seemed to be spinning but Rad wasn’t sure whether it was really spinning or he was just losing his mind. He looked up. A wall hanging adorned with elephants was also spinning.

He blinked. “I’m going to have to excuse myself,” he said. “I’ll just be a moment. The bathroom?”

“Just down the hall,” said the MP, pointing. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I misjudged your palate.”

“No problem, no problem at all,” said Rad. “I just need a minute.”

Rad found the bathroom. The pain was subsiding, only to be replaced by anger. That son-of-a-bitch MP completely suckered me, he thought.
The vindaloo is not spicy at all
. Misjudged your palate, my ass. He knew what he was doing.

Hell of a joke.

26

The Yakovlev jet that was waiting for Mark in Osh was an old Soviet clunker that had originally been built in the 1970s for regional travel. It was now owned by a Kazakh air charter company that the police force in Bishkek used with some frequency.

Mark had flown on similar planes on many occasions and appreciated the facelift that the charter company had recently given this plane; instead of fraying vinyl seats with sharp metal springs poking out of them, he found two rows of reasonably comfortable captain’s seats. And whereas the original Yakovlev had almost certainly provided nothing in the way of in-flight entertainment, this one had been outfitted with a single small LCD monitor, along with satellite Wi-Fi throughout the cabin.

The LCD monitor didn’t work, but the Wi-Fi did. Mark used it to contact Daria, communicating via a series of near-instant draft messages posted to a mutually accessible Gmail account.

You OK?

Fine. Where is he?

With D.

D?! As in…

Yes, that D.

I thought YOU were getting him?

I was at the embassy. Don’t worry. He’s safe, hidden. It’s better this way. They suspected me. I heard you got picked up.

Yeah, but I ditched them.

That’s my gal, thought Mark. He wanted to ask where she was now, but thought it better that he didn’t know. He read Daria’s next message.

Should I come get him from D?

Mark had to think about that. At this point, a transfer from Decker to Daria would just complicate matters, he decided.

No.

Why were you at the embassy?

Ordered there.

Why do they want him?

They won’t say.

Then screw them.

That’s what I told them. Didn’t go over well.

Thank you. Thank you.

Mark smiled as he read those words, struck by a realization he thought was funny.

He liked to think of himself as an adept manipulator, a spy’s spy who’d learned the hard way all the various methods that could be used to bend people to his will—bribes, the threat of an embarrassing revelation, an appeal to ego, to a higher calling, or even just to basic human decency. But Daria had proved to be his equal or better in the bending-people-to-her-will department.

He recalled how she’d interrupted his narde game not even twelve hours earlier and had pitched him on a scaled-down mission in about ten seconds. Now here he was, hundreds of miles away, on a mission that had rapidly been scaled up into who knows what.

And the funny thing was, he didn’t even mind. At least not now; he’d minded a bit when he’d had to forfeit the narde game. He typed his next message.

Hope to learn more tomorrow. Stay hidden, so you can’t be questioned. Maybe they will think you have him, will take
pressure off D. I won’t contact you again until I have this thing figured out.

Are you still at the embassy?

No.

They let you go?

Define let.

Where are you?

Next question.

Daria didn’t respond for a minute, then replied,

OK, I guess it’s better I don’t know. Be safe.

You too.

PART II

BAHRAIN

27

Bahrain

Mark touched down in Bahrain at seven in the morning.

He used his British passport to pass through customs without having to bother with a visa, exchanged money, bought three more prepaid cell phones—though his iPod was rigged like Daria’s, he didn’t want to be dependent on Wi-Fi—and then called the embassy in Bishkek.