The Leveling Read online

  “Try the InterContinental,” said Holtz. “I heard she’s working there as a concierge, probably just to gain access to the ChiComs who hang out there, but who knows, maybe she’s just hard up for money.”

  16

  DECKER WOKE UP to someone punching his solar plexus. When he tried to fight back, he found that he couldn’t because his arms had been immobilized.

  Someone yanked him up to a sitting position and then onto a metal chair. He wondered how long he had been unconscious. Minutes? Days? His head was still throbbing, and his left leg was excruciatingly stiff and swollen.

  “I wanted you to see this.”

  Metal bit into his wrists. Old-style handcuffs, he determined. He turned toward the voice, but someone shone a bright light in his eyes. He blinked and squinted.

  Absorb the pain, don’t fight it.

  “Turn down the light for our guest, please.”

  As Decker’s eyes adjusted, a form slowly took shape in front of him—it was a man, he realized, slumped in a wooden chair. A small man. Perhaps just a boy.

  “Do you recognize your friend?”

  It took Decker another moment to get a grip on his pain, to understand it and accept it and probe its limits. When he did, he was able to recognize the figure in front of him.

  Alty.

  Eighteen hours earlier…

  Decker marveled for a moment at the absurdity of what he was witnessing.

  Get the hell out of here, you jackass.

  Alty, a twenty-one-year-old Turkmen bartender that Decker had been using as a guide, was headed his way.

  Decker just hoped to God the security guards were looking elsewhere. He watched in horror as Alty risked a fifty-foot run across open grass. The moonlight made the kid an easy target.

  He could guess at Alty’s game plan. Sneak up to the ayatollah’s mansion, find a lighted window, start snapping photos or short video clips, hoping to get lucky, maybe even hear something. All for the glory of Turkmenistan or some such nonsense. But Alty didn’t have the equipment to do any of that right, much less the training. That was Decker’s job. That was why Decker had approached the mansion in the shadows cast on the lawn by trees and hedges, why he’d staked out the place for hours before scaling the fence and establishing a surveillance post on the roof of the ayatollah’s mansion, why he’d camouflaged himself to blend in with the rust-colored tile roof. The night vision goggles he was wearing kind of sucked, but they were better than nothing. Alty was as good as blind in the dark.

  He’d warned the kid to stay away. Getting just one of them inside the grounds had been risky enough.

  Ten minutes passed and nothing bad happened. Decker remained perfectly still, his body aligned in the moon shadow of a tall chimney, rendering him nearly invisible. He couldn’t see where Alty had ended up once the kid got close to the building. He got to hoping that Alty had just snapped a few photos with his iPhone and then hightailed it back over the fence that encircled the estate. It was possible. Decker couldn’t see every potential exit route, even from the roof. He might have missed Alty’s departure.

  But then a bark came from one of the well-lit outbuildings. Decker flipped up his night vision goggles, slowly raised his camera to his right eye, focused the telephoto lens on the building, and watched as a guard released two German shepherds. He checked his watch—it was exactly midnight. Probably the time the dogs were let out every night.

  He remembered the conversation he’d had with Alty a few hours earlier, when they were casing the estate. He’d specifically asked Alty about dogs.

  “No dogs.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “The mullahs think dogs are dirty.”

  “I’m not talking about people’s pets, I’m talking about guard dogs.”

  “Is against Islam.”

  “But I saw dogs in Turkmenistan.”

  “No dogs.”

  But evidently there were.

  And if Alty was still on the property, at ground level, he was screwed.

  On the front lawn of the mansion, two dim swaths of light spilled out from ground-floor windows. Alty had run toward the light on the left. Decker flipped his night vision goggles back down, stuffed his equipment into his waterproof gear bag, strapped the bag tight to his back, and then crawled on all fours, spiderlike, silently down the gentle pitch of the roof. When he reached the section directly above where he suspected Alty was, he extended his head past the copper gutter and scanned the area below him.

  Alty was wedged between a hedge and a Greek column that marked the edge of the raised portico in front of the mansion. His iPhone was held up to the window.

  “Alty!” Decker called down in a loud whisper.

  Alty’s head snapped around.

  “Look up. It’s Deck!”

  “Deck?”

  “Get the hell out of here. There are dogs.”

  “No dogs.”

  “Yes, dogs! I saw them; they’re loose. Run!”

  “You see dogs?”

  “Two of them. Big ones. Run!”

  Alty finally got it, because now he stood up, pocketed his iPhone, took a quick look at the lawn in front of him, and began to sprint toward the distant perimeter fence. But he’d only gone maybe twenty feet when the frantic barking started. A second later, one of the German shepherds rounded the corner at full speed.

  When Alty saw the dog, he spun around and headed back toward the house.

  That fucking idiot is going to try to climb one of the columns, Decker guessed. Which might save him temporarily from the dogs but will ensure that he’ll be captured.

  Ditch him. You can make it out on your own.

  Alty reached the column and tried to shimmy up it, but the dog was right there. It sank its teeth into Alty’s calf and didn’t let go. Decker eyed the perimeter fence.

  I can be over that fence in less than thirty seconds, dogs or no dogs…

  Alty screamed.

  Shit.

  Decker unsheathed his SOG SEAL Team knife, swung his body off the roof, dropped twenty feet, and landed directly on the back of the dog. A second later he slit the dog’s throat.

  Alty was still frantic, trying to shimmy up the column. Decker grabbed his belt and yanked him to the ground. “Run for the fence!”

  Alty tried to run, but his wounded leg kept giving out on him, so Decker half dragged him across the lawn. When the second dog tore up, crazed and barking wildly, Decker offered his left arm, which the German shepherd took in its jaws. With his right arm, Decker plunged his knife deep into the dog’s chest, twisting it as he heaved up. He threw the dog several feet up in the air and left it writhing on the ground.

  A guard ran out, gun drawn, from a grove of limbed-up plane trees not far from the main entrance gate. The perimeter fence was still a good hundred feet away. Decker hadn’t wanted to escalate matters by using his gun, but as the guard took aim at them, he pulled a Sig Sauer P226 from his nylon thigh holster and shot the guy in the chest. He grabbed Alty around the waist just as a volley of shots rang out.

  Alty’s body jumped. Decker returned fire, but he didn’t have a good sense of where the new threat was coming from. A quick glance at Alty’s neck told him the kid was either dead or would be within seconds.

  More shots rang out. Decker felt a bee-sting-like prick as a bullet grazed his left shoulder.

  Time to get the hell out of here, buddy.

  Using Alty’s body as a shield, Decker tried to advance toward the border fence. By now, he’d figured out that whoever was shooting at him was doing so from behind a low stone wall near the front of the mansion. Then someone started shooting at him from another angle.

  One of the shots hit the slide of Decker’s Sig.

  Decker didn’t drop the gun, but when he went to fire it, nothing happened.

  Goddamn motherfucking sonofabitch…

  He started pulling Alty back toward the house, still using the kid as a shield. No way he could make the front fence, not unarmed wi
th two guys taking potshots at him.

  He’d try for the back fence instead. It was farther away, but the forest of trees in the rear of the estate would provide cover. He got to a row of hedges in front of the mansion, ripped Alty’s iPhone out of the kid’s back pocket, let the boy drop, and sprinted on all fours, behind the hedges, toward the back of the mansion.

  Decker was remarkably fast for such a big man, and the wild shots into the hedges all missed their mark. But then a third security guard ran out from the rear of the property. And then a fourth, blocking yet another avenue of escape.

  With a working pistol, it wouldn’t have mattered. Without one, he was trapped.

  Or maybe not.

  Earlier that night he’d scaled the roof from a secluded alcove on the side of the mansion. Using the hedges in front of the mansion for cover, Decker sprinted to that alcove now, grabbed a vertical copper gutter with both hands—pulling it partially out of its wall anchors—and began to climb. Near the top, someone shot him in the thigh. For a moment he thought he might fall, but with one last Herculean burst of strength he lifted himself over the lip of the roof.

  He scrambled as fast as he could up the tiles, dove into a wedge between the roof and one of the five chimneys, and pulled a tourniquet off of his stripped-down chest rig, snapping the rubber band that had held it in place. After determining that the bullet hadn’t hit his femoral artery, he used the tourniquet to hold a pressure dressing in place, being sure not to completely cut off the flow of blood above the wound.

  What he wouldn’t give for a link to a Predator feed right now, he thought, working as fast as he could on the dressing. He had no eyes above and no weapon; the enemy had the advantage.

  When he finished the dressing, he pulled out his Sig and inspected the slide. No time to fieldstrip, no time to fix.

  Fuck, you are in a bad place, buddy. Gotta face reality.

  He pulled out Alty’s iPhone. He was breathing heavily. The tiles underneath him became slick from the blood dripping from his thigh.

  A couple of bullets ricocheted off the chimney. Decker had positioned himself so that the guards couldn’t get a good shot off at him from the ground, but he knew they’d be on the roof itself any minute.

  He used his thick finger to tap Alty’s iPhone to life.

  What was Holtz’s e-mail address?

  He closed his eyes for a moment.

  Pull yourself together.

  You’re not going to make it.

  Not Holtz. Sava. And Daria.

  He opened the e-mail app, typed [email protected], CC’d Daria, and attached a photo Alty had taken with his phone, and then another. The pictures were lousy, but they’d have to do—there was no way he had time to transfer all the high-res photos and voice data he’d collected.

  He couldn’t risk writing anything in the e-mail—all e-mail traffic here was monitored—so he raised his arm straight up and twirled his index finger in a circle as he used the iPhone to snap a photo of his arm. Mark would understand.

  He hit Send, took the gear bag off his back, snaked his arm quickly up over the top of the chimney, found a protruding screw he’d noticed earlier in the night while lowering microphone wires into the house, and used the microphone wires to hang his bag on the screw.

  Had the guards on the ground seen him? He’d been quick, no more than two seconds. And since the top of the chimney rose six feet above the highest point of the roof, his bag would stay hidden unless someone shimmied up the chimney and looked down it.

  A ladder clanged, first as it was raised, then as it fell onto the side of the house.

  Shit, you forgot the iPhone.

  Decker took a step toward the chimney, intending to hide the iPhone in his gear bag, just as one of the security guards crested the roof. They looked at each other for a moment and then the guard raised his gun. Decker pivoted and ran, stumbling across the roof as he tried to block out the pain in his thigh, his wet soles slipping on the tiles, taking fire from several angles because he was now exposed to guards on the ground.

  On the back side of the mansion, a ten-foot wall marked the perimeter of an inner courtyard. Decker ran toward where he thought this wall intersected with the house. Just before he hit the end of the roof, he dropped the iPhone into the gutter, hoping that’s where it would stay.

  Shots rang out as he took a giant leap off the roof, but he was moving fast and none connected. For a brief moment he was weightless under the bright moon, at peace and unafraid, his legs scissored apart in midstride.

  17

  Almaty, Kazakhstan

  ALMATY HAD CHANGED in the years since Mark had been there last—the skyscrapers were taller, the expensive foreign cars more plentiful, and there were more fancy shops on the tree-lined streets, all lit up and still packed with shoppers even at nine at night. Like Baku, it had been a dumpy backwater for the better part of a century while under Soviet rule—an old Silk Road town that had been completely bypassed by modernity—but now it was overflowing with oil money.

  The InterContinental sat on the heights on the south side of town. Mark found Daria working behind the marble-topped concierge desk, speaking Russian to a guest who had inquired about nearby restaurants. Beyond the desk lay a spacious lobby full of palm trees, a tropical curiosity that seemed absurdly luxurious against the backdrop of the rugged, snowcapped Tian Shan Mountains surrounding the city.

  Daria wore a charcoal-gray skirt suit with a white blouse and a name tag that read Maira.

  At first, Mark tried not to stare, but then he just let himself take her in. She was still striking, still the Daria he knew, but slightly fuller in her face, arms, and breasts than she’d been when they’d parted six months ago. When she’d first come to Baku to work for him as one of his operations officers, she’d been so slender and young looking that she could have passed for a senior in high school. Now she looked like a woman in her early thirties, which is what she was.

  The Russian guest left and Mark stepped forward.

  Daria’s eyes registered a hint of alarm, then she quickly looked down at the desk. “You are looking for a restaurant too?”

  “Sure. I guess I’d like to get a late dinner at the hotel.” Mark spoke Azeri.

  A long pause followed. Another guest, a bald man in a suit, got in line behind Mark.

  “That won’t be possible,” replied Daria in Azeri. “The hotel doesn’t serve dinner.”

  Mark could see a half-full dining room from where he was standing, one of several restaurants in the hotel serving dinner. “It’s urgent.”

  “I can recommend other restaurants.”

  The scarring that had been evident on her face the last time he’d seen her wasn’t noticeable, both because it had healed well and because she was wearing more makeup than she used to. Mark wasn’t crazy about the makeup—it dulled her absolutely smooth olive-skinned complexion, a feature that had been a powerful lure when, as a CIA officer, she’d been trying to recruit people to spy for the United States. She’d cut her dark hair shorter, so that it just grazed the tops of her shoulders. Her high cheekbones, however, remained unchanged—and made her look more refined than any of the rich guests mingling in the lobby.

  “OK.”

  She took out a map and pen, and with the certainty of a professional concierge who knew the city well, circled an area at the far northern end of Abylay Khan, a wide thoroughfare that bisected the city. “The Glasnost,” she said. It was near the train section, in a poorer section of the city.

  “I could use some company.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Mark had a sudden urge to say that he’d missed her, but from the way she’d addressed him from the start as a stranger, he assumed that she didn’t want to advertise that they knew each other. So instead he just thanked her and walked away, his mind distracted by the past.

  Mark’s apartment in Baku, eight months earlier…

  For the second night in a row, Daria made dinner.

 
For the first two weeks after arriving at his apartment to convalesce, all she had done was lie on her side in bed, with the window shades drawn and the door closed, agonizing in the semidarkness of his spare bedroom. Most of the food he’d brought to her bedside had gone uneaten. He’d tried to talk to her, to bring her back from the darkness, but his attempts had been clumsy and ineffective.

  Yesterday morning, though, after falling in the shower, Daria had seemed to turn a corner.

  “I’ve been too useless for too long,” she’d said.

  Last night, instead of huddling in the darkness, she’d made an Iranian pomegranate-walnut stew. Tonight, she cooked a small roast chicken, rice and vegetable plov, and dovga yogurt soup. It had taken her most of the day, given her injuries, but she hadn’t complained or accepted help when Mark had offered.

  They ate it all slowly, out on the balcony, with the sounds of Baku drifting up from the streets eight stories below them. The rumble of old Russian trucks mingled with the distant thuds of pile drivers pounding foundation supports for new skyscrapers deep into the ground. They drank a bottle of wine with dinner, then started in on another. As darkness fell, obscuring her scars, she grew cheerier, even elated at times.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said, after finishing the last of her plov.

  “Of?”

  Daria got up from the little dinner table and sat down on a bench near the edge of the balcony.

  “Of getting a master’s in international affairs.”

  Daria already had a law degree from Georgetown but had joined the CIA before taking the bar.

  “Oh?”

  “I need to think about a career. With a master’s in international affairs, and a JD, and my language skills, I could get a job practicing international law at, like, the UN, or Amnesty International. I need to do something decent with my life.”

  “You’d be good at that.” Those weren’t career options that appealed to Mark—he wasn’t much of a do-gooder—but he could see Daria enjoying that kind of work.

  “If I don’t I’ll just go back to…”