The Leveling Page 13

  He ate more sugared almonds, drank another can of Coke, and forced himself to continue.

  At the top of the ravine, a long patch of melting snow lay in a hollow hidden from the road but exposed to the surrounding hills. Decker placed his hands on top of the snow and let them numb up while the sun warmed his face. For there to be snow in April, he reasoned, he had to be at a relatively high altitude.

  Which way was the coast? He looked up at the sky, blinking from the brightness. The sun was halfway between high noon and the horizon. Was it morning or afternoon? Which direction was he facing?

  He was trained to survive in the wilderness for weeks on end, to orient himself by the sun and stars, to use natural cover as camouflage. But his mind was freezing up. He looked at the whiteness of the snow and began to get dizzy. Moss grew on the north sides of trees, but nothing at all grew up here. Deep in his gut he felt a sharp stab of pain, his stomach revolting against the sudden influx of food and drink.

  He should find a hole to hide in and camouflage himself.

  Far below, where he knew the road must be, a car skidded to a stop.

  The bottle of Smirnoff slipped out of his jacket as he struggled to stand. He slumped back down into the snow, opened the vodka, and poured it over where he knew the bullet wounds on his leg must be. The vodka soaked into the grease-stained work pants and the wound beneath burned. Decker clenched his teeth. His eyes wanted to tear up, but he was still too dehydrated to form tears.

  The air was cool and fresh, and he breathed in as deeply as he could, savoring the clean taste of it.

  He poured vodka into his swollen hands, soaking his fingers, then poured all that was left into his cupped palms and brought the alcohol to his face, trying to disinfect the cuts as best he could.

  Buying time, that’s all you’re doing. Fighting off infection for as long as you can.

  His face felt as though it had been doused with acid. He struggled to stand but wobbled on his feet. The blue sky and white snow swirled around him like a kaleidoscope.

  Still hidden from the road below, he began to walk slowly uphill again, resting after each step but making steady progress toward a pass between two low hills. When he was halfway to the top, the green metal roof of a house emerged, and then windows with decorative Persian arches. A mountain refuge. He hoped that no one was home, and that he could break in and hide there.

  The sun was hot on his neck. He finished the sugared almonds and drank another can of Coke. But when he went to put the empty can back in his coat pocket, he realized that the other empties were gone. They must have fallen out, he realized, left like a bread-crumb trail for his pursuers to follow. And he’d left the vodka bottle on the patch of snow.

  He was losing his mind. His feet no longer hurt because he couldn’t even feel them.

  Decker looked behind him. And wondered whether the black figure he saw below was a mirage. He looked up to the sky, half expecting to see a dragon from Middle Earth.

  When he glanced behind him again, the black figure was still there, climbing fast up the hill.

  Decker eyed the house. It was no more than a few hundred feet away, but up a long steep slope. If he could get there and get inside, he might have a chance. There might be a gun, or a car.

  He climbed, going faster now, no longer resting between steps, driven by a hidden store of adrenaline. He kept his eyes focused on the ground and began to count his steps…one, two…

  A voice called out for him to stop, but he ignored it. When he glanced behind him, it looked as though the black figure hadn’t gained much ground.

  A few steps later he fell, but he instantly lifted himself up from the dirt and continued his march. Hundred ten, hundred eleven…He concentrated on the ground immediately in front of him, taking care with each quick step and only occasionally glancing up at the house to gauge his progress.

  His eyes registered a flattening of the ground, followed by the black macadam of a road that had been cut into the side of the mountain, a road that had been hidden from below.

  Decker looked up.

  Two men, both carrying AK-47s, sprang up from a drainage ditch and rushed at him from opposite sides.

  One guy below to flush him out, the other two to capture, Decker realized.

  He spun around, took a step back toward the hill, stuck his hand in his coat pocket, and fingered one of the blades from the pruning shears.

  The first guard hit him in the gut with a football tackle. As they tumbled to the ground as one, Decker whipped out the blade and stabbed the man’s carotid artery.

  The second guard lit into Decker with the butt of his gun, swinging it like an ax. Decker absorbed a few blows to his head and thighs and a glancing blow to a knee. He pulled out the second blade from the pruning shears, stabbed the guy’s Achilles tendon, and was about to try for the femoral artery when a volley of twenty or so bullets flew over him, inches from his head. A hit to his ankle connected, breaking bone. Two men grabbed his arms, pinning them to the asphalt. Another kicked him repeatedly in the balls and guts.

  A few seconds later, a sweaty nervous man with ugly cauliflower ears that poked out from beneath his black turban stood over Decker. “You’ll pay for this,” he said.

  40

  Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

  MARK AND DARIA abandoned the stolen Volga in a vast dirt parking lot crammed almost as far as the eye could see with old trucks and cars and hordes of Turkmen.

  The Tolkuchka Bazaar was only a few miles from the sterile white buildings of downtown Ashgabat, but it might as well have been a different country; it was as if all the messiness of human life had been swept up from the streets of the capital and deposited in a stinking heap on the edge of the Kara-Kum Desert.

  There were carpets, giant crates of fruit, boxes of hard candy, clothes, spices, stacks of Barf laundry detergent, electronics from China, dromedary camels…It smelled of lamb roasting on ancient iron grills and human sweat and mud. Squat old women with gold teeth and bright, tightly tied headscarves sat on little crates and called out for people to inspect their wares.

  Daria bought an embroidered traditional Turkmen robe and several imitation-silk headscarves. Mark bought shoes, shirts, and pants, all locally made, hair dye, and a new wallet, which he filled with Daria’s counterfeit manats. Then he used Daria’s phone to call Holtz.

  “Sava, I’m sorry. Thompson pulled a fucking bait and switch—”

  “Main entrance to the Tolkuchka Bazaar. Be here at noon.”

  “It’s almost noon now.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at the air—”

  “Take surveillance-detection measures, but be quick about it. You rat me out to the Agency or come with a tail on your ass, I’ll shoot you myself.”

  Mark hung up without waiting for Holtz’s response, walked back to the parking lot, and haggled with a merchant over the price of a used four-wheel-drive Niva—the Russian version of a jeep. He paid the equivalent of fifteen hundred dollars in cash and drove it to the edge of the parking lot, where Daria cut his hair and helped him dye what remained black. By the time they’d finished, Holtz was there.

  Mark saw him scanning the crowd near the entrance to the bazaar, his head protruding a good foot above the crush of bodies flowing past him as if he were a rock in the middle of a fast-moving river.

  He called Holtz and told him to meet him inside the bazaar, in the far southern corner. And then, when Holtz was almost there, he called back to tell him to instead meet him in the far northern corner. And then outside the bazaar, in the parking lot by the camels.

  “What is this crap?” Holtz said, when Mark finally approached from behind. “Man, what happened to your face?”

  “Congratulations, you’re alone.”

  “I told you I’d do an SD run,” said Holtz, as if offended that Mark hadn’t trusted him to shake a tail.

  “Walk with me.” When Holtz began to follow him, Mark said, “Thompson and
I were attacked on the way to the airport. At least one Turkmen soldier was shot, probably fatally. A couple Guoanbu agents are probably also dead. Thompson may or may not survive. Tell me about Decker.”

  “A Turkmen soldier was shot?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “The city’s going to be in lockdown mode. I mean, this is a fucking police state. The Turkmen don’t screw around with this kind of thing.” Holtz scanned the crowds. “Did you shoot the soldier?”

  “No.”

  Holtz looked both worried and indignant. “And are you sure you weren’t followed here, dude?”

  They’d arrived at the parking lot. Instead of answering Holtz, Mark pointed to an open patch of dirt between a cluster of haphazardly parked cars. “Sit down. You’re easy to spot.”

  Eventually Holtz did, although he looked uncomfortable doing so.

  “Talk to us about Decker,” said Mark.

  “Us?”

  Daria appeared and took a seat next to Mark. She’d been following them from a distance, ready to provide backup for Mark if he got into trouble.

  Holtz looked at her and rolled his eyes. “Oh, great.”

  “So this is the deal,” said Holtz. “A few weeks ago, inflation starts going through the roof here—”

  “Daria already told me about all that,” said Mark.

  “Yeah, well, what she doesn’t know is that Decker figured out why. Turns out it was the ChiComs. They were printing counterfeit money. Tons of it, just dumping it on the market.”

  “I told you I thought it was the Chinese before I left,” said Daria. “You wouldn’t listen. I told Decker that too. That’s how he figured it out.”

  “You told me rumors. Decker brought me evidence.”

  “What evidence?” asked Mark.

  “Decker knew this bartender. Hell, he knew a lot of bartenders, which was kind of an issue with me, but one did black market currency exchange on the side.”

  “Got a name?”

  “Decker wouldn’t tell me, said he’d promised not to. Anyway, this bartender tells him the ChiComs are buying up US dollars all over the city.”

  “With counterfeit manats,” said Mark.

  “Yep.”

  “What bar was this at?”

  “Decker wouldn’t tell me that either, said he’d be compromising his source. Which was a problem. I couldn’t rat out the ChiComs to the Turkmen just because Decker heard something at a bar; I needed real evidence if the charge was going to stick. So I thought, why not find a way to trace all these dollars that were being bought up? If I could show the Turkmen that they were going straight to the ChiComs, well, then the Turkmen would have to boot the bastards. You familiar with RFID technology?”

  “No,” said Mark.

  Holtz appeared satisfied, but not surprised, by Mark’s ignorance.

  “It stands for radio frequency identification,” said Daria. “It’s a—”

  “—way to track things,” said Holtz. “Big businesses have starting using it instead of bar codes. They even have passive RFIDs that are like the-head-of-a-pin small and don’t need batteries in the transmitter. With the right transmitter and right receiver, you can track a signal from like a kilometer away. What I did was supply Decker with a one-hundred-dollar bill that had one of these tiny RFIDs inserted into a slice in it. The idea being that Decker’s bartender friend would sell this bill to the ChiComs and then Decker would track where they went. And that’s actually what happened.”

  “So where’d he track it to?” asked Mark.

  “Last I know he was driving east on the M-thirty-seven toward Dushakh. His bartender buddy was with him.”

  “That’s no-man’s-land out there. Who else besides the bartender was helping Decker at this point?”

  “I gave him some tips,” said Holtz.

  “He’s trained as a SEAL, not as a spy. They’re different crafts.”

  “Decker wanted the job, and he was the one who recruited the bartender.”

  “Did State know what he was doing?”

  “Oh yeah, and by now the Defense Department was in on the action too. Once I told them what the ChiComs were up to, everybody’s interest perked up real good. They were pushing me to find out anything I could, especially since the CIA was just holed up in the embassy, playing it safe.”

  “Deck’s a six-foot-four SEAL with blond hair and no formal intelligence training. And he doesn’t speak a word of Turkmen or any other foreign language for that matter.”

  “Like I said, his bartender friend was helping him. They were working as a team.”

  “You were bullshitting State and DoD, weren’t you?” said Daria.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You inflated John’s résumé before being hired by State. So you could charge more for him.”

  “Who the hell is John?”

  “John Decker. The guy we’re talking about.”

  “You don’t know jack shit, Daria.”

  “I saw the write-up you provided to State selling them on me. You said—”

  “That was a classified document.”

  “You said I had extensive paramilitary experience and had operated in war zones. That I had experience with explosives and had been trained as a sniper.”

  “You got weapons training with the CIA, along with some paramilitary training. We all did.”

  “You lied, Bruce. And you did it because it allowed you to charge State more per day for me. And you did the same thing with Decker. That’s why State and DoD were comfortable with him working in the field. What’d you tell them? That he was trained by one of the CIA’s best?” Daria turned to Mark. “That would be you.”

  “I never trained him for an operation like this,” noted Mark, though, now that he thought about it, when Decker had stayed with him in Baku, they’d spent a lot of time discussing things like surveillance detection techniques, tracking techniques, dead drops, ways to read people’s body language…Decker had been eager to learn everything he could of spycraft. Maybe too eager, Mark thought now.

  Daria turned back to Holtz. “How many languages did you say he spoke?”

  Holtz turned to Mark. “You know why I had to fire her? Because she was fucking for information. Thought she’d do a little moonlighting, play superspy instead of just doing her damn work as a translator. So she starts balling—”

  “You are so full of it,” said Daria.

  “—this fat Turkmen deputy energy minister, and the guy’s wife finds out and raises a stink.”

  “That’s a total lie.”

  “Check with State,” said Holtz to Mark. “They know what happened.”

  “You sold John out,” said Daria. “You presented him as something he wasn’t to State, State passed that bad information on to DoD, and because of it—”

  “Enough,” said Mark. He turned to Holtz. “When’s the last time you heard from Deck?”

  A group of five women, each stooped over and carrying a rolled-up carpet on her back, passed by in front of the Niva. Holtz and Daria and Mark stayed quiet until they were gone.

  “After Decker left Ashgabat, we agreed that he wouldn’t try to communicate with me unless he knew he could do so securely. The idea, though, was that he’d only be gone for a day or two tops, just enough time to document where the money went to.”

  “What kind of equipment was he carrying?”

  “The RFID tracker, a digital recorder with a directional microphone and wire probes, and a digital camera with a high-powered telephoto. He had top-of-the-line surveillance equipment. I paid out the ass for it.”

  “Give me your phone,” said Mark to Daria. When she’d handed it over, Mark pulled up the photos Alty8 had sent them and tossed the phone to Holtz. “These mean anything to you?”

  Holtz didn’t recognize the mansion and didn’t appear to recognize Decker’s arm. But when he came to the photo of the two men exchanging a briefcase, he said, “Holy shit. That’s Li Zemin, the head of the Guoanbu her
e in Ashgabat. Did Decker take this picture?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How much do you want to bet that briefcase is full of hundred-dollar bills? And that one of those bills has an RFID tracker on it?”

  “What about the guy with the black turban?”

  “Him I’ve never seen before.”

  They were quiet for a moment. Mark felt a warm desert breeze on his cheek. He stood up.

  Daria stood up too and brushed the fine dirt off the rear of her Turkmen dress. “By the way, Bruce, you can take your noncompete contract and stuff it up your dirty ass.”

  “When you get back to the States, and you will, someday you will, honey, I’ll have my lawyers draw up a suit that’ll leave you in the gutter.”

  “I’m not going back to the States, and if I ever did, I wouldn’t have a penny to my name.” She opened the driver’s side door to the Niva. “There’d be nothing for you to take.”

  PART III

  41

  Turkmenistan, Near the Afghan Border

  THE MUD-BRICK HOUSE rose up like a little knoll on the surface of the flat grassy plain.

  Behind the house, an old pickup truck had been driven into a drainage ditch next to an outhouse and a solitary apple tree. A cow stood in the wooden bed of the pickup, unable to lie down because of the way she’d been tied to the cab. Goats had wandered through a hole in the stick-fence enclosure and were grazing on either side of the road.

  Li Zemin, chief of mission for the Guoanbu in Ashgabat, pulled up in a jeep with his driver.

  He was a tall man with sunken cheeks and an angular jawline. His lips were pressed together in a tight, controlled line that was neither a smile nor a frown, and his alert-looking eyes suggested intelligence. Although he held no military rank, his uncle—the man who’d raised him from the age of two—was a high-ranking army general and member of China’s powerful Central Military Commission. Partially because of this connection to power, but also because rumors of Zemin’s ruthless management of the Turkmen Guoanbu had reached the army, the special forces Chinese soldiers who stood in front of the house snapped to attention as Zemin passed by.