The Leveling Read online

  “The wild parrots came back two weeks ago.” Mahmoud pointed to a bird feeder in his garden; two green parrots were indeed eating from it.

  “You recognize the house?” asked Mark.

  Mahmoud turned to Daria. “Have I told you the story about the caged parrot?”

  “You have.”

  “Ah, of course, of course. I forget you know all these things.” He turned to Mark. “It involves a merchant who had a caged parrot of exceptional beauty. One day the merchant told the parrot he had to go to India and asked whether there was anything the parrot wanted.”

  Mark wondered what this had to do with the photograph.

  “The parrot said he wanted the merchant to visit wild parrots in India and tell them of how he keeps his own parrot in a cage. So the merchant went to India and did this. Immediately, one of the wild parrots fell lifeless off his branch to the ground.”

  Mahmoud used his hand to suggest a dead parrot.

  “When the merchant returned home, he explained to his caged parrot what had happened. Moments later, his own parrot died! Grieving, the man took his parrot out of his cage and laid it beneath a tree, intending to bury it. But the moment he placed it on the ground, the parrot flew away, high into the trees. The merchant cried, “What have you done?’ And the parrot said, ‘I thought that by telling the Indian parrots of how you kept me caged, you would realize that what you were doing is wrong. But the free parrots knew at once that you would never change. So one of them showed me the way to my freedom.’”

  Mahmoud turned back to Mark and Daria. “The photo you showed me is of a palace you will find in north Tehran. The brother of Amir Bayat lives there. He is a high-ranking ayatollah and the leader of the Guardian Council.”

  “I know of him,” said Daria.

  “I will shed no tears if harms comes to him during the hunt for your friend. But be careful, my dear. Ayatollah Bayat is a dangerous man. He is like the merchant, a man you can’t reason with. He will never change.”

  Daria examined the photo. “I thought public officials were supposed to live humbly.”

  “The palace was one that the Shah kept for his family and guests. It is an architectural monstrosity that mocks Iran. Ayatollah Bayat gets away with living there because it is owned by the government and he occasionally uses it for official Guardian Council functions. He says he doesn’t have a home, that he sleeps at his office. It is a fiction, of course. It is his home. I will make a map for you to show you where it is.”

  They left a few minutes later. After Mahmoud had dropped them back off in the parking garage, Mark asked, “What happened to his son?”

  “He was hanged, in public.”

  When Daria didn’t elaborate, Mark pressed her. “Because?”

  “Because he was gay.” After they’d walked in silence for a while, Daria added, “A year later, Mahmoud’s wife killed herself. I found out about it from people at the bazaar—that’s why I tried to recruit him, I thought he might still harbor a grudge.”

  “I take it he does.”

  “Yeah, you could say that.”

  57

  Tehran, Iran

  IN THE FRONT of Ayatollah Bayat’s mansion, wide white-marble steps led up to a spacious portico ringed by Greek columns. Deep-set balconies were lit by chandeliers on the upper levels of the house.

  The mansion stood behind a tall fence and was the only structure in the vicinity surrounded by any expanse of land, consisting of nearly two acres’ worth—Mark guessed—of poorly tended lawn and limbed-up plane trees. Overgrown bushes grew on the perimeter of the property, and weeds had crept up out of the cracks in the main driveway. A stagnant reflecting pool lay in front of the main entrance. Two guards stood at attention at the front gate.

  Mark and Daria drove up to a point well above the mansion and parked on the street. Mark took out a pair of binoculars he’d bought downtown and studied the grounds.

  “They have dogs there.”

  “Unlikely,” said Daria. “Religious Iranians think dogs are unclean.”

  He handed her the binoculars. “Check out the little white flags. They’re in the middle of the lawn and under the trees on the left. It’s an invisible fence.”

  “What do they need an invisible fence for? They’ve got a real fence.”

  “To keep the dogs away from the house. Because religious Iranians think dogs are unclean. The way they have it set up, the dogs are limited to the outside perimeter of the property, between the invisible fence and the real fence.”

  Daria focused the binoculars. “I heard the army started using them in some cases.”

  “A guy I know in Baku has a big spread.” Mark was thinking of Orkhan Gambar. “He does the same thing. You get the security of the dogs without having to interact with them.”

  Daria looked through the binoculars a little more. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

  Mark noticed the white chimneys on top of the house. “Give me your phone.”

  Daria handed it over and Mark brought up the last of the three photos that Decker had e-mailed them, the one in which Decker’s raised hand appeared against a white background. He showed it to Daria.

  “That white part look anything like a chimney to you?”

  Daria studied the photo. “Maybe.” She looked at it some more, then down at the house itself. “Yeah, it does. What the hell was John thinking?”

  “That he was trapped up on the roof and about to get caught. So he did his best under pressure to give us a trail to follow.”

  Mark figured that Decker had been using the roof as a surveillance post from which to spy on Ayatollah Bayat. And that he likely would have had surveillance equipment on him. Decker wouldn’t have wanted that equipment to fall into the wrong hands.

  “Shit,” said Mark.

  “Are you thinking—”

  “Rally on me. That was the hand signal. And he was standing in front of one of those chimneys.”

  They both stared at the house for a while until Mark reluctantly said, “If I’m going to do this, we’re going to need some more equipment.”

  58

  ALTHOUGH BOTH OF his new jailers spoke fluent English, Decker guessed from their facial features that they were Chinese. One wore a white T-shirt and gray slacks, the other a white T-shirt and blue slacks.

  Blue apologized to Decker for his previous treatment, gave him a shirt and pants, a little food and drink, set his broken ankle, and allowed him to sleep for a few minutes.

  Gray woke Decker up, stripped him naked, poured cold water all over him, hit his broken ankle with a baseball bat, and forced Decker to stand by strapping a noose made of electrical wire around his neck so that if he fell, he’d hang.

  Blue said that he hated this kind of inhumane treatment and wanted to find a way to make it stop. If only Decker would help…

  Beyond the good-cop-bad-cop routine, Decker knew what they were doing—they’d stripped his clothes off to strip him of his identity, in order to build a new, more dependent and compliant one. They’d had him stand with a broken ankle and a noose around his neck to make him feel that if he fell, he’d be committing suicide.

  Why are you doing this to yourself? Let us help you.

  Break apart a person’s identity and then give them a false sense of being able to guide their own destiny. These guys knew exactly what they were doing.

  Time bent into strange, hallucinogenic contortions. He spent long periods downstairs in the safe, his mouth pressed up to one of the holes that had been drilled through the metal, afraid that if he drifted off to sleep his mouth would fall from the hole and he’d die from lack of oxygen.

  After hours or days—Decker wasn’t sure—Gray hauled him up from the pit and injected him with what he said was a truth serum. Real truth serums didn’t exist, Decker knew. There were drugs like sodium pentothal that could make you less inhibited, but just because you were more inclined to talk didn’t mean you felt some pressing need to tell the truth while you were talkin
g.

  “There is no shame in sharing information with us,” said Blue. “This drug is so strong. No one is able to resist it.”

  A ready-made excuse to give in. They were screwing with his mind, with his pride.

  “You would personally be doing me a great favor,” said Blue.

  Decker said nothing. Blue left the room. Gray strung him up again with the noose around his neck. The pain that shot through Decker’s ankle and wounded thigh made his legs shake. The drug compromised his ability to balance. He started wheezing and drooling.

  When Blue returned he said, “I have spoken with my superiors. They have agreed that if you are generous enough to help us with this matter, we can arrange for a cash payment to you of three hundred thousand dollars plus transport to the border of your choice.”

  It was just a bullshit ploy to get him to talk, he knew. But there was an irrational voice inside him that wanted to believe the offer was real, that he could walk away from all this with a bit of cash and his life intact…

  His legs began to buckle. He felt pressure on his neck—the weight of his own body pulling him down into the noose. White spots danced in front of his eyes. Everything started playing in slow motion.

  “I beg of you,” said Blue. “You can go free if you help us now.”

  Decker was past being able to speak.

  Gray came up and kicked Decker’s legs out from under him. He put his mouth right next to Decker’s ear, so that he could be heard over the choking sounds.

  “Soon I will start cutting. Your fingers, your eyes, your dick, your asshole. I’ll keep you alive so you can watch as I cut you down to a stump. If you still don’t talk, I’ll pick up children from the street and kill them in front of you until you tell us what we want to know.” He spoke with the quiet confidence of someone who was absolutely insane.

  “Don’t let him do this, friend,” said Blue. “Help me to stop him. He’s mad!”

  Decker passed out. When he regained consciousness, he was being dragged down into the dank pit. They stuffed him in the safe and slammed the door shut.

  The sound of his unsteady breathing reverberated in the small space. After a while, the air warmed up.

  Decker’s father was a big man, with strong arms. He felt his father’s arms around him now, followed by the strange sensation of having reentered his mother’s womb, of ending where he’d started.

  It’s over.

  At least the path forward was now clear. He still had his teeth. He could kill himself by tearing open his wrist. The sodium pentothal was still coursing through him; it probably wouldn’t even hurt if he did it now.

  Decker twisted his head to the right and put his mouth to one of the air holes. He didn’t want to do it. He loved this world, loved his family, loved himself, loved being alive. But he didn’t have a choice. He had to do it soon.

  Before they came back for him.

  59

  Tehran, Iran

  MARK EYED THE fence surrounding Ayatollah Bayat’s estate. Made of decorative wrought iron, it was ten feet tall and topped by sharp black spikes. He figured it would have taken Decker an effortless two seconds to vault right over it.

  It was one in the morning, and he was standing in an alley across the street. He was tired. He tried to do a few last-minute stretches. Crap, he thought. He was too old for this.

  He tried to rile himself up by thinking about his ransacked apartment in Baku and the loss of his book.

  Nothing, no anger whatsoever.

  He remembered the call from Decker’s father. Do this for him, do it for Decker’s mother, do it for Decker.

  He eyed the spikes on top of the fence again.

  Or not. Suffering through god-awful, heart-wrenching tragedy was just part of the human condition. It wasn’t his job to try to fix everything for everybody.

  Then he thought about what Daria would think of him if he backed out.

  Shit, he was really going to have to do this.

  A couple of minutes later, he heard the sound of squealing tires and crunching metal. Then the horn of the stolen Paykan began to wail. That would be Daria, he knew. Evidently she wasn’t having any last-minute doubts.

  The German shepherd guard dogs that had been released at midnight started snapping their jaws and barking like crazy. Mark counted three of them racing off. The two guards by the front gate also took off at a run.

  Mark couldn’t see the Paykan on the opposite side of the estate, but if Daria had done her job well, the guards would find it lodged in the fence. Spray-painted on the hood, in Farsi, would be the words Death to the Guardian Council! and Independence, Freedom, Iranian Republic!

  Another guard emerged from the black woods, sprinting to the front of the mansion.

  Mark eyed the fence one last time, ran at it, and found a purchase for his feet on the intricate scrollwork about halfway up. Spikes jabbed into his chest as he tried to swing his body over the top. The crotch of his pants ripped, and the five-inch knife strapped to his ankle got caught on one of the spikes.

  It took him a few seconds to kick himself free.

  He hit the grass and felt a sharp pain in his kidneys as he fell on his back, but in an instant was up and racing across the open lawn toward the mansion.

  Within seconds he had reached a gutter downspout. The copper was green with age and anchored into the brick. He began to shimmy up as best he could.

  Voices were screaming out from the site of the Paykan accident.

  Although he was wiry and strong, Mark nevertheless kept slipping down until he found he could gain more traction by wedging his foot between the gutter and the wall.

  About halfway up, he noticed handprints other than his own—visible because they had disturbed the copper’s green patina—going up the length of the downspout.

  The space between the handprints was huge.

  He imagined Decker running at the wall, leaping up and grabbing the downspout ten feet off the ground, then scaling the rest within seconds.

  Mark felt himself slip. If the guards had half a brain, he thought, one of them would do a perimeter sweep soon. He strained to shimmy up the rest of the way. Lifting himself over the lip of the gutter nearly proved too much. By the time he was actually sitting on the tile roof, he was exhausted, but he forced himself to keep going until he reached the ridgeline.

  The first of the three chimneys was ten feet away. He checked his watch—thirty seconds behind schedule—then removed a small penlight from his pocket and inspected the exterior of the first chimney, looking for a sign from Decker. He inspected the flashing and tiles around the chimney, pulling them back, looking for a piece of paper, or anything that Decker might have left behind. He pulled himself up over the top of the chimney and stuck his head inside.

  Nothing.

  Below him, the guards were trying to push the Paykan off the fence. He could see them clearly, which meant they could see him too, if they chose to look up.

  An inspection of the exterior of the second chimney revealed nothing, but this time, when he reached his hand into the blackened interior, he felt a collection of loose wires. The wires had been affixed to a piece of metal protruding from the interior of the chimney. When he tugged on the wires, there was resistance, as though something were tied to the end of them.

  Mark pulled up a small waterproof gear bag with a shoulder strap, detached it from the wires, and stuffed it into his backpack.

  Police sirens drew near.

  One of the guards who had left the front gate returned to his post, putting him in a direct line of sight to the gutter downspout.

  From his backpack, Mark pulled out a glass liter bottle filled with gas and screwed off the cap. He took a rag, twisted it into the narrow mouth of the bottle, held the bottle upside down for a moment to saturate the rag with gas, lit the whole contraption with a lighter, and threw it.

  The Molotov cocktail arced over the edge of the roof, leaving little airborne droplets of fire in its wake. It crashed into a
walled courtyard that abutted the side of the mansion opposite his exit route.

  Cries rang out from inside the mansion. When the guard by the gate ran off to investigate, Mark took off across the roof, running as silently as he could on the tiles. He crawled down spiderlike from the ridge and, without pausing, swung his body over the edge. His feet found the gutter downspout, and he slid down quickly, so quickly that he lost his grip halfway down.

  He landed on a bush, dazed but still able to move, then pulled himself to his feet and sprinted across the lawn, making no effort now to avoid detection. Halfway across, he heard barking and glanced to his right. A lone German shepherd was coming at him at top speed, snapping its jaws. Mark tried to sprint faster, but his legs wouldn’t respond—it was as if he were running through water. The fence was only a few strides away.

  He turned and threw his forearm up just as the German shepherd lunged. The dog took his forearm in its jaws and bit down with an intense pressure that sent spikes of pain shooting up his arm even through his makeshift armor—five metal school rulers lashed together with surgical tape under a leather jacket. He was knocked to the ground. The dog growled and shook its head, trying to grind its teeth in deeper.

  Pepper spray was illegal in Iran, but wasp spray was a decent substitute. With his free hand, Mark grabbed a small can from his jacket pocket, aimed, and shot a stream of pesticide into the dog’s eyes. The dog held on to his forearm for a moment, but then let go, confused and snapping its jaws as best it could, as though unsure where this new enemy was.

  “Sorry, buddy.”

  A guard sprinted out from the corner of the mansion.

  Mark dropped the wasp spray and ran. As he was pushing himself over the points at the top of the fence, he heard gunshots. He fell to the ground on the opposite side and stumbled toward the road, where Daria was waiting for him in yet another stolen Paykan. The passenger side door opened and he fell into the car.