The Leveling Read online

  Daria didn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t have to—Mark knew what she meant.

  She’d been born in Tehran some thirty years ago, as the Islamic revolution was raging. Her Iranian mother had been slaughtered by revolutionaries. Her American father had refused to care for her. Despite being raised in a wealthy Virginia suburb by well-intentioned adoptive parents, her inauspicious start in life, coupled with her own inclinations, had led her to a backstabbing underworld populated by spies and thieves. That underworld was what she didn’t want to go back to.

  “I’d have to finish a master’s program in the States or Europe,” said Daria, “but I was thinking of taking some courses here at Western first. It’d be cheaper and the credits should transfer.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “Maybe I could take one of your courses.”

  Mark got up and sat next to her on the bench. “You wouldn’t learn much.”

  She leaned into him. “Easy A, though.”

  “Not necessarily. I am, however, receptive to bribes.”

  The Glasnost restaurant was popular with retired Kazakh men who liked to sit at the plastic tables covered with plastic tablecloths, sip Derbes beer, and play toguz kumalaki, a popular board game. It was located on a potholed street lined with shops that sold little more than the bare necessities of life, reminding Mark of the neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he’d grown up.

  Daria appeared just after he’d started in on a Derbes. She was still wearing her InterContinental uniform, though she’d removed the name tag. Mark had meant to offer a brief explanation of why he was here, but instead he thought back to the last time he’d seen her naked, on his bed, after sex.

  He wondered what the state of affairs was between her and Decker. None of his business, he knew. But he still wondered.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Mark pointed to his beer, and the one he’d bought for her. “Thought we could catch up over dinner.”

  “I’m assuming you’re here about Deck?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Follow me. I don’t want to talk here.”

  Daria started walking.

  Mark left a twenty-dollar American bill on the table—the smallest he had—to cover what was only four dollars’ worth of beer, and followed her out the back of the restaurant. She led him down an alley that smelled of cat piss, then through the rear door of a two-story apartment building. After turning down a flight of steps, she stopped in front of a metal door and fished an oversized key out of her jacket pocket.

  The door opened onto a small room. A streetlamp cast dim light through the basement windows near the ceiling. The dirty white walls were bare, and a single uncovered lightbulb dangled from the ceiling. Daria turned it on. A brown mini-refrigerator with a dented door sat in the corner next to a utility sink. The faded green plastic table in the center of the room looked as though it had spent many years aging in the sunshine. There was one fold-up chair, on which Daria now sat down.

  She pointed to a couple of wooden milk crates in the corner. “Grab a few.”

  Mark stacked them on top of one another and sat across the table from her. They looked at each other for a while.

  “It’s good to see you,” said Mark.

  “Stop staring at my face.”

  “I wasn’t staring.”

  “Yes you were.”

  “I was just staring at you, not at—”

  “You were staring at the scars.” She put a hand to her temple and turned away from him.

  “I can’t even notice them. You look great, Daria.”

  Mark’s apartment in Baku, seven months earlier…

  Mark had slept around plenty, and had even had some decent long-term relationships over the years, but the only other time he’d woken up in the morning with a woman actually in his arms was when he’d had sex for the first time, back when he’d been a sophomore in high school.

  Ordinarily he preferred a certain distance when he slept. He didn’t like people breathing on him, no matter how good they looked or how nice they smelled, and he got hot if he felt crowded in bed. Even a light hand on his chest could lead to insomnia.

  So even though he and Daria had started having sex weeks ago, not long after she’d started making good dinners and he’d started buying good wine, he’d always moved over to his side of the bed afterward. Until last night, that is, when they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms.

  Now it was morning, and since he’d woken up before her, he just lay there for a while, thinking. Her breathing was light, and her bare skin was cool where it touched his own. On the end table next to the bed, the wilted stargazer lilies that he’d bought two weeks ago hung limp in a vase. After fifteen minutes of just lying there, he started getting antsy, remembering why he liked his space in bed. He considered getting up. It was already late.

  Then the phone on his end table rang.

  “What time is it?” Daria stretched her arms up toward the headboard.

  “Eight.”

  Mark leaned out of bed and checked the caller ID. It just registered as an international number. “Shit,” he said.

  “Are you going to answer it?”

  Mark picked up the phone and listened silently as Daria curled up into the covers. He said “Yeah” a couple of times, and then, “Is that subject to discussion?” and finally, just before hanging up, “I’ll tell her.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Mark sat up in bed and ran his hand through his hair. “That was Kaufman.”

  “And?”

  “He’s calling you in. Back to Washington, to debrief you.”

  “You mean fire me.”

  “We knew it was coming.” The fight over the pipeline had exposed Daria’s divided loyalties between the CIA and an Iranian resistance group. It had just been a matter of time until the CIA fired her. They’d just been waiting until she recovered enough to go through the exit interviews.

  Daria curled into him. “Can’t I do the debrief at the embassy?”

  “No.”

  “Fine, then I’ll go back to the States for a few weeks. What’s wrong? You’re tense.”

  Mark didn’t answer right away. “Kaufman also told me the Azeris have filed a PNG on you.”

  Daria froze up. PNG stood for persona non grata. It meant the Azeris were kicking her out of Azerbaijan.

  “It sucks, I know,” said Mark.

  They lay in silence for a minute as they both considered the full implications of what that meant.

  “Did you know this was coming?” asked Daria.

  Ordinarily Mark considered himself to be an adept liar. As a CIA officer, he’d had plenty of practice. But even before he spoke, he was afraid that his timing and intonation would be subtly off. A normal person would never notice, but Daria wasn’t normal. She’d been his best operations officer. “No.”

  “You did know. Didn’t you?” She pulled her hand off his chest.

  “I suspected, that’s all.”

  “You didn’t talk to Orkhan about it? He didn’t tell you?”

  “He didn’t tell me anything.”

  “So all that talk about my taking courses here—”

  “I didn’t know this was going to happen, Daria. I just know the system. I knew it was a possibility.”

  She took a while to let that settle. “Did you try to stop it from happening?”

  The last time Mark had spoken to Orkhan, Daria had still been holed up in his spare bedroom, driving herself crazy with her dark thoughts and recriminations. And while he and Orkhan hadn’t talked about Daria being served with a PNG, if they had, Mark might not have pushed back on the idea. At the time, he certainly hadn’t thought that her hanging out with an introverted washed-up spy who used to be her boss, in the very city where her life had gone to hell, in a country famous for corruption, was a recipe for long-term happiness. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  “Maybe I should have,” said Mark.

  “Can you get t
he Azeris to reconsider?”

  “No. They’re responding to Washington, Kaufman was adamant, and the PNG has already been filed.”

  A long silence passed between them.

  “And you’re staying here.”

  When Mark didn’t answer, Daria sat up in bed. “Well…I guess that’s it then.” She sounded angry, but it was a hurt, sad kind of anger.

  “Daria.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t make this hard.”

  “I work here.”

  “I understand.”

  “My whole life is here. I can’t just—”

  “I wouldn’t want to take you away from that. It’s no big deal. I’ll pack today,”

  They kept talking, but it soon became clear there really wasn’t much more to say. Daria had to leave, and Mark wasn’t willing to go with her.

  “What is this place?” Mark figured maybe it was a safe house she kept for meetings like this, when she wanted to be away from prying eyes.

  “I live here.”

  He took a closer look around him. There was no bed, but there was a door—he’d assumed it was a closet—in the far corner. Maybe that was the bedroom. A glass was perched on the side of the utility sink. Inside the glass was a toothbrush. “I like it.”

  He hated it. He hated to think that this was what Daria’s life had come to.

  Mark looked around the room again. “How do you cook?”

  “I don’t.”

  Daria had been raised by upper-crust diplomats, so her voice had a sophisticated lilt to it. It sounded completely out of place in a shit hole like this.

  “What are you doing here, Daria?”

  “What I’m doing here is none of your business. The question is what are you doing here?”

  “You even go back to the States?”

  He knew she had, because he’d kept tabs on her without her knowing it. She’d been staying with her adoptive parents, doing pro bono work for a charity that was trying to help orphans in Iran. Mark had been touched, given that Daria was an orphan of sorts herself. Knowing that she’d started to build a new life for herself had put his mind at ease.

  “For a bit.”

  “How was it?”

  “Not so great. The CIA wouldn’t lift my cover, so my résumé’s got a six-year blank on it. People would let me work for them for free, but that’s about it. And I got sick of living with my parents.”

  “You said you would call me when you got settled. You never did.”

  “I know,” she said. “What do you want?”

  18

  ALTY HAD BEEN propped up in the chair, but his head sagged at an unnatural angle.

  “We must bury him soon.”

  Decker turned toward the voice. The man who’d spoken had distinctive dark circles under his eyes and wore a black turban. But it was the cauliflower wrestler ears, bulbous and ugly, that Decker—a former heavyweight wrestler himself—really noticed. This was the man he’d been tracking.

  He was in what he guessed was a basement, seated in the center of a threadbare carpet that had been rolled out over a rough concrete floor. The concrete foundation walls were mottled with water stains. A workbench whose top was cluttered with assorted tools stood in one corner. There was a strong smell of mold.

  Decker glanced behind him. Two men with automatic rifles slouched beside a utilitarian staircase leading up to the floor above. Above him ran exposed floor joists.

  “And your friend,” said the man in the black turban. “What is his religion?”

  Decker didn’t really know. The subject had never come up. “Muslim.” Decker hardly recognized his own voice. It sounded parched and scratchy.

  “Then we will arrange for a proper burial. And your religion?”

  Decker remembered Mark Sava once giving him advice. If you’re ever captured by Islamists, Mark had said, don’t try to get them to sympathize with you by saying you’re a Muslim, or that you’ve read the Qur’an. If you get a genuine religious nut as an interrogator, things will be worse for you if he thinks you’ve been exposed to the word of Allah and have rejected it, or haven’t properly followed it. If he thinks you’re a Christian or Buddhist or Jew or whatever, he might just feel sorry for you.

  “Christian.” That was even kind of true.

  “You have read the Qur’an?”

  “No, never.”

  The man in the black turban asked why Decker had been at the ayatollah’s house.

  “I’m under orders not to say.”

  “Under whose orders?”

  “I can’t tell you.” Decker hoped they would think some government was actually issuing him orders—that someone would actually care if he disappeared.

  “You wish the same fate as your friend?”

  Confuse them. Buy time. They won’t kill you until they think they’ve learned everything they can from you.

  “In two weeks you’ll figure it all out for yourself.”

  “Two weeks? Why two weeks?”

  “In two weeks you’ll find out.”

  “You lie.”

  “Whatever, dude.”

  “You speak like an American.”

  “I am an American.”

  “What is your name?”

  “John Decker.” Decker hoped that they’d find out about his Navy SEAL experience and mistakenly assume that he was still a SEAL, and think that he was a high-value capture.

  The man produced Alty’s iPhone and placed it on a stool a few feet in front of Decker.

  Decker tried not to stare at it, tried not to show his distress.

  “You sent an e-mail from this phone just before you were captured. Why?”

  “That’s not my phone.”

  “One of the people you sent the e-mail to is a CIA agent named Mark Sava. Are you working for him?”

  So they knew about the photos he’d e-mailed to Mark and Daria. It was so stupid of him, forgetting to put the damn iPhone in his gear bag inside the chimney.

  “I said that’s not my phone. I didn’t send any e-mails from it.” Decker gestured to Alty with his chin. “It’s his phone.”

  “Then why wasn’t it with him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he dropped it.”

  “It was recovered from the roof.”

  “So maybe he dropped it when he was on the roof with me.”

  “When was he on the roof with you?”

  “Before you shot him. We were both up there.”

  “If this isn’t your phone, then surely you have a cell phone of your own. Or a camera?”

  “They’re with my partner.” In two weeks something happens. You have a partner. Keep track of your lies. Believe your lies.

  “Your partner is dead. You can see this for yourself.” The man wearing the black turban lifted Alty’s chin and let the lifeless head drop.

  “Alty was our guide. My partner wasn’t captured.”

  “You have no partner.”

  “I did.”

  “And you claim this partner now has your belongings, including your cell phone and camera?”

  “He does.”

  “Where is this partner now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he also working for Sava?”

  “I told you I’m not working for Sava. I can’t tell you who I’m working for.”

  A second later, Decker absorbed a heavy blow to the head, which was followed by another, and another. Amateurs, he thought. Beating someone was a lousy way to extract information. He began to think that maybe he could handle this.

  You have a partner. Something happens in two weeks. Keep the lies simple. Wait for them to make a mistake.

  19

  Almaty, Kazakhstan

  DARIA SAT WITH her hands crossed over her chest as Mark told her about the assassination attempt, his expulsion from Azerbaijan, the e-mail from Decker, and finally, his meeting with Holtz.

  She thought he looked about the same as the last time she’d seen him. The same brown eyes; still not visi
bly muscular, though she knew he was deceptively strong, in a lithe, sinewy way. Maybe a little more gray around the temples, but not much. He could have passed for an old thirty or a young fifty. Not the kind of guy most people would notice.

  She’d once been fooled by his average-looking appearance, but now she saw past it. Now she noticed right away that his eyes were cold, and just a bit too wide set, making him look a little reptilian. Now she picked up immediately on the natural half sneer on his lips. Though she knew he was capable of great kindness, that expression reminded her that he was equally capable of apathy, even cruelty.

  “It was Holtz who told me where to find you,” said Mark.

  “You didn’t get my message?”

  “What message?”

  “I called you in Baku.”

  “Must have been after I left.”

  “I called because I got the e-mail too.”

  “So you were the CC on it. I wondered.”

  “I recognized Deck’s arm too. I thought he might be in trouble, so I wanted you to contact Holtz. Which you did anyway.”

  “Why didn’t someone come after you the way they did to me?”

  “Maybe because my e-mail address doesn’t have my name on it?”

  “Clever.”

  “Maybe because all my e-mails are run through an account that encrypts them before forwarding them to a second account?”

  His eyes fixed on her. “I wasn’t thinking like a spy, Daria. I was thinking like a professor. Because that’s what I am. Or rather, was.”

  “By the way. Holtz was lying. He didn’t fire me. I quit.”

  “OK.”

  Daria stared at Mark for a second, trying to gauge whether he believed her. Then it hit her—he didn’t care one way or the other. Because he didn’t care about her. She had to get that through her head once and for all.

  “Let’s look at the pictures,” she said.

  Mark pulled the flash drive out of his coat pocket.

  “Don’t bother, I’ve got them on my laptop,” said Daria. “They’re in my bedroom.”

  20

  Almaty, Kazakhstan

  DARIA CRACKED HER bedroom door open just enough to slip inside, but Mark was still able to get a glimpse of her setup. A hotel blanket covered a low cot, she’d stacked her clothes on an industrial metal shelf, and a postcard-sized reproduction of van Gogh’s Irises had been affixed to the wall with a pink thumbtack. He thought of Daria going to sleep in there alone, staring up at those irises as the night closed in around her.