Dan Mayland
Death of a Spy
Author’s Note
At danmayland.com, you’ll find extras that might be helpful or interesting to have when reading Death of a Spy or other novels in the Mark Sava series — maps that may be downloaded or printed, my own photos of places featured in the novels, lists of characters, an annotated bibliography, and a glossary.
DM
Epigraph
If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
Maps
Part One
1
The eldest of all the maids employed by the Dachi, a boutique hotel in charming old Tbilisi, massaged a knot in the small of her back, brushed a lock of hair out of her eyes as she examined her cleaning list, and sighed.
ROOM 405. LAWRENCE PRENTIS BOWLAN.
As far as she was concerned, there were two types of men in this world: those who thought it perfectly acceptable to proposition a sixty-year-old widow as she attempted to clean a hotel room — without receiving any encouragement that their affections would be welcomed! — and those who didn’t. Mr. Bowlan, she feared, was one of the former.
Standing with her cleaning cart outside of room 405, she could hear that the television was still on inside the room. She sighed again.
Mr. Bowlan had spent a night at the Dachi the week before, and had been in his room then too when she’d come to clean it. When she’d bent down to collect the two empty wine bottles he’d placed by the garbage bin, she recalled how his eyes had lingered on her for longer than they should have. Ten years ago, she might have been flattered; now, it just caused her to consider that the male libido was a particularly tiresome evolutionary trait.
It was one in the afternoon. She’d already cleaned all the other rooms on her list. Steeling herself to the task at hand — he hadn’t actually propositioned her the last time, he probably wouldn’t now — she knocked three times.
“Housekeeping,” she called out, in heavily accented English.
While waiting for a response, she glanced in her cleaning cart and confirmed that she had a second canister of air freshener. Last time she’d needed to use extra because Bowlan’s room had smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, despite the fact that smoking was prohibited throughout the hotel.
No one answered, so she gave two more sharp raps. An electronic key card hung from a loop on her apron; after waiting a moment, she inserted it into the lock.
“Housekeeping,” she called again as the lock disengaged.
The first thing she noticed upon stepping into the room was not the smell of smoke, but rather…what was that smell?
Moments later she saw him. Startled, she jumped back a step, but she didn’t scream, at least not in that initial pulse-quickening moment of discovery. She’d been cleaning hotel rooms for the better part of twenty years. It wasn’t the first time she’d walked in to find a guest passed out drunk on the floor.
He lay in a fetal heap, facing away from her. She hoped, upon waking, he’d at least have the decency to clean up the urine that was puddled on the tile floor around him. That was what she’d smelled. Disgusting. A man his age — Mr. Bowlan had to be near eighty — should know better.
She shook her head and frowned in disapproval as she stepped closer to investigate. Standing right over him, she still didn’t scream, even when she perceived that Mr. Bowlan was strangely still, and that his left hand was infused with a strange purplish tint, and that his head appeared to be twisted at an unnatural angle. Maids sometimes did find dead guests. Not often, but it happened. One had to be prepared.
As she stepped around Mr. Bowlan, she gripped the small silver cross that hung from her neck. And that was when she saw his face.
The deathly pale, wide-with-terror eyes would have been enough, but it was the mouth — lips pulled back tight, yellow skeleton-like teeth locked in a cry of pain — that would give her nightmares for years to come.
She screamed.
2
While the late Larry Bowlan was being poked and prodded by a forensic pathologist at Tbilisi’s Central Republican Hospital, former CIA station chief Mark Sava — who happened to have been Larry’s boss — was considering that in the all the years he’d been abroad, every apartment he’d ever lived in had come with an exterior balcony.
This was not a coincidence; balconies were common in the sad constellation of post-Soviet states in which Mark operated. And he was quite fond of balconies, of drinking wine on them as the sun set, or sleeping on them when the temperature was right.
His best, he recalled, as he gently rocked his ten-day-old daughter back and forth — he was cradling her in his left hand the way he would a football — had been when he’d been working as a professor of international relations and living in a high-rise apartment in Baku, Azerbaijan, right after he’d quit the CIA. What a view he’d had of the city!
His worst — and there were many candidates — had been a contemptible, bullet-riddled, railingless, bathtub-sized concrete projection in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, that had looked out over a poorly maintained and frequently used outhouse. That had been nearly two decades earlier, back when he’d been doing paramilitary work for the CIA’s special activities division.
Those two balconies and others were on his mind now only because he was considering them in relation to the balcony he was standing upon at the moment. When he’d first moved in, it had been a miserable affair. Rusted balusters, a cracked concrete floor, too small to accommodate even a table for one. But his wife had since had the floor redone with hand-painted chrysanthemum-patterned tile imported from Iran, and Mark, after painting the balusters a glossy black, had carefully arranged potted tomato plants around the perimeter.
The green tomato vines cheered him now, as did the pleasant June weather, and the feel of his daughter in his arms. But there was nothing he could do about the size of the balcony, and the fact that it was too close to the street for his liking, so he was thinking that, now that he was married, and a father, and the owner of a successful business — which is to say, happier and wealthier than he’d ever been in his life — it might soon be time to upgrade to a balcony that would more accurately reflect his present station.
Turning his attention to his tomato plants, which were the reason he’d ventured onto the balcony in the first place, he bent down and dipped a finger into one of the pots, taking care not to wake his daughter as he did so. Already dry, he noted — with the hotter weather the things were sucking up water like crazy. So he headed to the kitchen, intending to grab a watering can from underneath the sink.
Upon seeing his wife, his face brightened. “Didn’t know you were awake.”
“I just got up,” said Daria, his wife of six months. “How was she?”
“Way too perky until six, snoozing since then, though.”
They kissed, and Mark poured himself a second cup of black coffee before taking a seat across from Daria at the kitchen table. His mind felt a little foggy because he’d been up with Lila since four in the morning. He’d watched competing groups of Russian acrobats perform on a televised talent show while she’d gurgled and burped on his lap, digesting her last feeding. When she’d finally fallen asleep at dawn, Mark had made himself an early breakfast of leftover Chinese food and strong Turkish coffee. It was now eight, and he was tired, but it was an easy, comfortable tired balanced by the caffeine.