The Leveling Read online

  In front of him sat Melissa Bates, formerly the head of the CIA’s Office of Near East Analysis, now a member of the CIA’s Persia House.

  “What have you got for me?”

  “You asked for a quantitative analysis regarding the likelihood that intelligence reports regarding Khorasani are correct.”

  The president opened his palms. Get on with it already.

  After reviewing the essentials of what the CIA knew about Iran’s dictator, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khorasani, Bates got to the point: “The question becomes, what is the likelihood that someone like Khorasani would seek revenge, given what we believe happened to his daughter? In an attempt to answer that question, our statisticians compiled data from other Iranian fathers who have experienced similar situations. Data from Iran itself wasn’t available, but there are millions of Iranians spread out across the world, in Bahrain, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United States…”

  After twenty minutes of listening to Bates walk him through all the figures, the president rubbed his temples. “What’s the bottom line here?”

  Bates pulled out a series of charts, which she explained were regression analyses that took into account the age, religiosity, and social status of the fathers as a predictive measure of whether they would seek revenge.

  “The bottom line is this—the older a man is, and the higher his social status, the less likely he is to seek revenge. For someone like Khorasani, you’re talking about less than a one percent chance that he’s going to resort to violence. But even that figure doesn’t tell the real story, because it doesn’t distinguish an eye-for-an-eye kind of revenge from what Khorasani, as the leader of a nation, is theoretically capable of. Most of the revenge killings we studied were rational, from the point of the killer. They redressed a wrong in a way that fit with the perpetrator’s worldview—an eye for an eye. In only two instances was revenge exacted in a way that could be considered irrational—in Turkey when a father went on a monthlong arson spree, killing twenty, and in Bahrain where a father drowned the five young children of his daughter’s rapist. In the case of Khorasani, all the evidence my office has compiled indicates that, despite his willingness to support groups that kill innocents, the intelligence reports we’re receiving would represent a break from his rational model. There’s not enough data to perform a decent analysis on the probability of his breaking with his rational model, but when we just plug in what numbers we have, you’re talking close to nil.”

  “Except that the Mossad says it’s going to happen.”

  “Except that the Mossad says it’s going to happen,” Bates confirmed. “And I trust their intelligence operation. And the Mossad report has been confirmed by our own sources in the MEK.”

  The president rubbed his temples. “Are you saying you lack confidence in the assessment you just gave me?”

  “I am, Mr. President. You know the rule—garbage in, garbage out. We did our absolute best to meet your mandate in a time frame that would prove useful to you. But we were assembling data, sometimes incomplete, from a variety of countries, all of whom treat crime statistics differently. Not to mention the fact that comparing the actions of your regular man on the street with a ruler like Khorasani is sketchy at best. I wouldn’t trust this analysis.”

  After Melissa Bates left, the president leaned back in his chair, removed his watch, placed it on his desk, and ran his hand through his thin hair. White stubble covered his chin.

  “I want every intelligence agency working overtime, vacuuming up every scrap of information they can about what the Iranians are up to,” he said to his chief of staff. “Open wallets, crack heads. Anything you get comes straight to me ASAP.”

  “Wallets are already open. Heads are already being cracked.”

  “I’d feel a lot better if we had some kind of confirmation, from a source outside the Mossad and MEK, that we’re not being jerked around and acting on bad intel.”

  48

  Turkmenistan, Near the Border with Iran

  MARK MET MURAT at a roadside truck stop on the outskirts of Ashgabat. The dirt parking lot was littered with little straws and burned metal wires, evidence of truckers dosing themselves with opium before venturing across the bleak Kara-Kum Desert.

  “Chadors for the religious ladies!” Murat, slouching, pointed to the dusty rolls of black fabric that filled most of the Russian 18-wheeler. The truck trailer’s canvas sides had been ratcheted down, but sand and road filth had swirled in through the gaps. “The chadors protect the vodka we hide inside them!” Murat seemed to think that was funny. “Call when you make it through.” He took a cheap cell phone out of his front pocket. “This will work in Iran and even at the border you will have good antenna. When you cross, give the soldiers this.” He handed over an Iranian passport that had been stamped with an expired visa. “Tell them you went to Ashgabat to gamble and are now paying the truck driver a fee to take you back to Iran. The soldiers on both sides of the border will accept the visa. Everything has been arranged.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “They will not be paid. Which is why the documentation is always accepted. Where is the woman?”

  “She’ll be going alone.” Daria, it turned out, had a perfectly valid Iranian passport—one that she’d neglected to surrender after leaving the Agency. So she was just going to drive across the border.

  Murat eyed him. “No refund. Our agreement was for two.”

  “I didn’t ask for a refund.”

  Mark climbed into the cab of the truck. A Russian driver wearing a soiled dress shirt and a red bandana on his head acknowledged him with a surly nod.

  The air grew cooler as they drove up toward the mountain pass that led into Iran. Soon they cleared a gated army checkpoint that marked the beginning of the restricted border zone. The Kopet Dag Mountains here were gently sloping, covered with occasional patches of green spring grass, and broken up by shallow canyons. It was six thirty in the evening. The sun hung low in the sky, and the shadows were long.

  Eventually the road leveled out and the truck’s air brakes hissed as it ground to a stop. They’d reached the border. Mark counted six trucks and two cars ahead of them.

  The truck at the front of the line was being inspected by Turkmen soldiers dressed in camouflage uniforms and floppy safari hats. Beyond it, Mark could see a squat white-marble building and a ten-foot-tall wrought-iron border fence.

  A minute later, Daria pulled up behind them in the Niva. She wore a black headscarf and was smoking. Two more trucks pulled up behind her. Turkmen soldiers with automatic rifles paced back and forth at the very end of the line.

  When the lead truck was cleared to pass, the whole line moved forward. Mark wasn’t surprised when he saw the soldier who’d been guarding the Chinese embassy earlier in the day. He wore civilian clothes and stood next to an older Chinese; both men stood off to the side, eyeing the incoming vehicles as the Turkmen soldiers searched them.

  Mark turned to the driver. Speaking Russian, he said, “Murat told you of the special problems we’re likely to encounter?”

  “Calm yourself.” The driver spoke like a man who was used to dealing with panicked novices. But after a minute of silence, he asked, “What special problems?”

  Mark explained that he’d been involved in the shooting in downtown Ashgabat earlier in the day and that it was entirely possible that people at the border would be looking for him, people who almost certainly wouldn’t be bound by any smuggling agreement arrived at between Murat and the border soldiers.

  The driver protested that Murat had said nothing of this, nothing at all! And that Mark should have said something earlier! Now that they were in line, they couldn’t turn around without triggering a search.

  Mark claimed that he had told Murat about the situation, which was a lie, and that he wished he’d said something sooner, which was another lie—in fact, he’d purposely waited to tell the Russian what was really going on until it was too late to turn around. />
  A minute later, the line moved forward again. The Turkmen soldiers descended on a new truck. They checked under the hood, inside and under the cab, and through everything being transported in the trailer.

  The driver eyed the Chinese observers then banged his hands on the steering wheel. “Murat told me nothing of this.”

  “Listen, buddy. This is what we’re going to have to do…”

  Mark explained his plan. The driver twisted in his seat to face Mark and clenched his teeth. “Don’t touch me. And keep your clothes on, pedik.”

  Mark gestured to the Chinese. “Do you have any better ideas?”

  The driver didn’t.

  The driver threw his truck into neutral and let it slowly roll back down the hill. When Mark heard the crunch of the truck’s rear bumper ramming into Daria’s front bumper, he slipped out of the cab wearing the Russian driver’s old shirt, pants, plastic sandals, and red-bandana head covering.

  Daria climbed out of her car.

  “We’ve switched to plan B.” Mark glanced at her dented bumper.

  “Yeah, I saw them.”

  Mark made eye contact with the trucker directly behind Daria’s car and drew a finger across his throat. Mind your own business and keep your mouth shut. The trucker turned away just as the Russian driver joined them, wearing Mark’s clothes, and began to argue with Mark about the accident. Soon one of the Turkmen soldiers from the end of the line showed up and said to take it up on the other side of the border if they needed to. The line was moving.

  Fine, said Mark.

  Daria climbed up into the back of the truck, where she took a seat on one of the rolls of black chadors—a religious Iranian woman would never scandalize herself by riding with an unfamiliar man in the cab.

  The Russian climbed into Daria’s car, while Mark took his place behind the steering wheel of the 18-wheeler. The seat was frayed, and hard springs poked into his back. He twisted the key in the ignition, shifted into first, gently raised the clutch, and stalled out. The second time he got it and pulled up to where he should have been in line. Then he studied his new passport.

  Given the grisly nature of her suicide, Mark had become adept at blocking out most memories of his mother. But he thought of her now because she’d immigrated to the United States from the Soviet state of Georgia as a girl. Her father had been a Russian, and Mark had inherited some of his grandfather’s Russian features—the slightly droopy eyelids, the light skin, the brown eyes. Enough so that he thought he looked at least a bit like the Russian driver, whose passport he now held in his hand. They were also roughly the same height and age. It wouldn’t hurt that the photo itself was creased and dirty.

  The Russian driver’s eyes were even deeper set than his own, though. With dark circles under them.

  Mark wet his finger, dipped it into the coffee-can ashtray on the floor, and rubbed in some ash under each eye. Then he smeared ash on his teeth near where they met the gums.

  He glanced at the passport photo again. The Russian’s hair was brown and Mark had dyed his black, so he tried to push more of his hair under the bandana he now wore on his head.

  Hanging from the rearview mirror was a set of well-worn worry beads. He took them down and placed them in his pocket. A half-empty pack of Java cigarettes, a Russian brand, lay on the dashboard. He pocketed those too.

  Mark pulled up through the gates without stalling and stopped where he was told. The Turkmen soldiers descended, pulling up the front hood and loosening the canvas sides of the trailer. World War II–style canteens dangled from the soldiers’ belts, and their pants were tucked into black army boots.

  It was almost seven thirty. The sun had just dipped below the mountains, but the overhead lights hadn’t been switched on yet, for which Mark was grateful—shadows would help.

  He stepped out of the cab. He handed the Russian driver’s passport and the inventory papers to a Turkmen official with a sergeant’s chevron on his shoulder. The Chinese embassy guard and his Guoanbu minder were so focused on the search of the trailer that they hardly even glanced at Mark.

  “Where do you go?”

  Mark took a step to his left, so that he was in the shadow of the truck. “Mashhad.”

  He pulled the pack of Java cigarettes out of his front shirt pocket and silently offered one to the army officer, who shook his head no.

  “And what do you carry?”

  “Textiles.” He spoke Russian. A hundred feet in front of him, a row of Turkmen flags hung limply by a wrought-iron gate. Past the gate stood a row of Iranian flags and a few Iranian soldiers. A sign posted in front of a beige-colored building read, in Farsi and English, Welcome to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  They discovered Daria in the trailer. She was dressed head to toe in a black chador and had fashioned a veil for her face.

  “And who is she?”

  “My brother is friends with her brother. She goes to Mashhad.” Mark lit his cigarette, and the smoke swirled around his head. The clothes he was wearing stunk of vodka sweat.

  “Does she pay you?”

  Mark made a face, as if offended. “No. Her father has died. She goes to Mashhad to mourn.”

  “Does she have papers?”

  “Yes, yes, of course. She is Iranian.”

  Mark glanced at Daria. After some commotion, a female border guard appeared. Daria was taken away to be questioned in private, without her veil. The older Chinese guard inspected the underside of the truck.

  Ten minutes later, it was over. Mark’s papers were signed. Daria reappeared, and the solicitous border soldiers formed a makeshift staircase out of packing crates so that it was easier for her to climb into the back of the truck’s trailer. As he drove off toward the Iranian border, Mark saw the Chinese guard staring intently at the Niva, as though it might contain the people they were looking for. Instead, they’d find a Russian who would be turned away at the border because he’d left his identification papers back in Ashgabat.

  The truck was searched again on the Iranian side. After having their passports stamped in the customs hall, under a large photo of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khorasani, they were told they could leave.

  Mark drove toward a gate topped by a sign that read Islamic Republic of Iran Border Terminal. Beyond the gate, a couple of kids were kicking a soccer ball in the road, taking advantage of the bright border-terminal lights that had just come on. On the shoulder of the road, truckers stood next to their parked rigs, smoking as they waited for what could be days to cross into Turkmenistan. Even in normal times, the Turkmen were paranoid about how many trucks they let in.

  An alarm began to sound.

  At first Mark didn’t realize it was directed at him, nor did the final Iranian border soldiers, who seemed inclined to let him pass. Then someone called out in Farsi from across the wide stretch of pavement, and one of the soldiers manning the last exit blew a whistle.

  Mark laid on the horn, pushed his foot down on the accelerator, and shifted through the gears as quickly as he could. The final border checkpoint flew by him as cars veered to the side of the road.

  A minute later, he was through the tiny town, thundering past little concrete-walled shops fronted by metal security gates. He began to gather speed more quickly now that he was hurtling downhill. The mountains on this side of the border loomed up as dark brown shadows, drier even than the Turkmen side, without a hint of green.

  The landscape reminded Mark of the spaghetti western movies he used to watch as a kid, in which someone always wound up dying of thirst.

  He floored the accelerator. From behind him, he heard a tapping at the narrow slider window in the back of the cab. Daria was perched in the space between the cab and the trailer. When they got to a relatively straight section of road, he muscled the window all the way open. Daria was just slender enough to squeeze through it.

  “Welcome to Iran,” she said.

  “The asshole in the truck behind us must have said something. He was the only one who sa
w us make the switch.”

  An army jeep a couple of hundred feet behind them was gaining. Mark kept the accelerator floored. The whole cab rattled madly, and the steering wheel had way too much play in it.

  A sets of headlights appeared in front of them.

  Mark peered through the gloom. Between the approaching headlights and his current position, the road narrowed as it squeezed between the side of the mountain and the drop-off below.

  “Buckle your seat belt,” he said.

  “There are no seat belts.”

  He felt for his own and grabbed air.

  “Then hold on. I’m gonna—”

  He gripped the wheel tighter as the truck bounced dangerously over a bump in the road.

  “—try to block the road,” said Daria, finishing his thought for him.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m with you.”

  When the road narrowed, Mark braked as hard as he could without skidding out. He yanked the steering wheel to the right, so that the cab of the truck smashed into the wall of the mountain and the trailer fishtailed out into the center of the road. For a moment the whole rig teetered, then the trailer slowly tipped over, pulling the cab down with it.

  The front windshield shattered. Mark smelled diesel fuel. His shoulder had slammed into the asphalt. Daria had fallen on top of him.

  “Go, go!” he yelled. “Out the top!”

  She pushed off his shoulder and squeezed through the passenger-side window. Mark was right behind her.

  The jeep that had followed them from the border was nearly upon them. A few shots rang out as they jumped to the ground, putting the truck between themselves and the bullets. The car that had been approaching came to a stop about a hundred feet down the road.

  Mark sprinted over to it, reaching it in seconds.

  The bearded, middle-aged man behind the wheel was frantically trying to execute a K-turn in the middle of the road, but he was constricted by the steep mountain face above him and the precipitous drop-off. No one else was in the car.