The Leveling Read online

  She emerged from the room with a new-looking laptop in hand.

  “Jesus, Daria. This place depresses me.”

  Daria had always been a bit of a loner—the old-school boys at the CIA had never really trusted her, given the Iranian-American mixed-race thing—but not this much of a loner.

  “I don’t need your pity.”

  “I was just—”

  “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m spying on the Chinese. I’ve only been here a couple weeks. I’m still getting settled, and most of the time I’m at the hotel, which is where all the Chinese government types hang out. Don’t be so quick to judge.”

  Mark wondered what it would have been like if, instead of saying good-bye when Daria had been kicked out of Azerbaijan, he’d gone with her to Washington and settled down. What would have happened if he’d taken a few consulting jobs, cashed in on his Agency experience, made some real money, bought a big house…

  He had a sense that Daria would have been OK with that scenario. But a big part of him had genuinely thought that she’d have a better chance at a normal life without him. And though he’d fallen for her, and had longed for her after she’d left, he hadn’t wanted to leave Baku.

  It occurred to him, though, that just eight months later, she’d failed completely at living a normal life, and he’d had to leave Baku anyway.

  Daria opened the photo files. “So we’re talking lousy quality. Worse than even a cheap digital camera.”

  She pulled up information about the memory size of each photo, then clicked from one picture to the next, quickly highlighting one detail here and another there, using the laptop as a natural extension of her brain in a way that made Mark feel stupid. Back in the dark ages, when he’d actually spied on people, he’d used film. Since leaving the Agency, it had never occurred to him to take pictures for pleasure.

  “The only digital cameras that take these kinds of low-res pictures are kids’ cameras and older cell phones,” she said.

  “Focus on Deck’s arm.”

  Daria navigated to that window. “I think he was taking a picture of himself—the arm in the photo looks like it’s really close to the camera lens. And from the time stamp on this, I can tell it was e-mailed to us a minute after the photo was taken. So it’s likely John sent the e-mail himself. Why would he—”

  “Rally on me,” said Mark.

  “What?”

  “That’s what Deck’s telling us. You’re leading a squad or platoon or whatever. You want your men to rally around you, come to where you are, but you can’t just yell out the order. Instead you raise your index finger up like Deck’s doing and circle your hand around in the air. That’s why his hand is blurry. He’s circling it.”

  “Why not just come out and write that in the e-mail?”

  Mark shrugged. “Maybe he was afraid someone would read the e-mail. If he sent this from Turkmenistan, that would have been a legitimate concern. They read everything. Instead, he sent a sign that he knew I would probably understand but that the Turkmen wouldn’t.”

  Daria clicked on the next two photos and placed them side by side on her laptop screen. “These two are older—the one of the mansion was taken a day before the arm photo, the one of two guys exchanging a briefcase, two days before. We can assume the man in the black turban is a sayyid, probably a Shiite.”

  A sayyid was considered a direct descendant of Muhammad. Most wore black turbans.

  “Which narrows it down to what, a few million people?” said Mark. “We could be talking Azerbaijan, Iraq, Iran, and Bahrain…and even if the sayyid in the photo was from one of those countries, it doesn’t mean that’s where the picture was taken.”

  They spent the next twenty minutes staring at that photo, enlarging it, cropping it, doing everything they could to try to get more information off of it. But the resolution was awful, the background dark, and other than the black turban, the clothes the men wore revealed nothing. They had no better luck with the photo of the mansion. It was adorned with Ionic Greek columns, surrounded by shrubbery, and didn’t look like anything that belonged anywhere in Central Asia or the Middle East, much less Turkmenistan.

  Eventually they ran out of things to scrutinize. The room went quiet for a moment, at which point Mark said, “Hey, Daria. You think now would be a good time for you to tell me what you guys were really doing in Turkmenistan?”

  For the first time, Daria smiled. “I thought your buddy Holtz already told you.”

  “Give me a break. He didn’t tell me shit. I’m not that stupid.”

  21

  DECKER LAY ON his back, naked and chained to a rusted metal bed frame.

  Someone asked him another question, but the English was heavily accented and he couldn’t concentrate well enough to follow it.

  He didn’t need to hear the question, though, because the questions were always the same. His captors knew from the photos on the iPhone that he’d followed a trail of money from Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, to the ayatollah’s mansion. What they wanted to know was—why? Who had ordered him to do this? Who else knew that he had done this? Who was the second person he’d e-mailed just before being captured?

  Decker figured that the only reason he was still alive was that he hadn’t answered those questions yet. At least not to their satisfaction. What he’d told them was that his partner, the fictional man he still insisted was out there, had hired him to help watch the ayatollah’s house, but that he didn’t know why.

  He heard the swish of the truncheon cutting through air. A new burst of pain spiked up through his feet like an electric shock—then coursed up his legs, side, and into his arms until finally it felt as though his brain might just short-circuit.

  The bastinado, you know this. You’ve been trained to resist it.

  No, not to resist it, to accept it. Don’t fight the pain.

  Beating a prisoner’s bare feet, where there were clusters of sensitive nerves, was a common form of torture, Decker knew. During training, he’d inflicted it on fellow SEALs and they’d done the same to him.

  Time passed. There was more pain. Men left, men arrived. Decker heard voices whispering in his ear. He couldn’t understand them, though he vaguely realized they were speaking in English.

  Through the agony he thought, amateurs. He was beyond listening, beyond being able to respond. The pain racking his body was too great. They were wasting their breath.

  After a while, someone unchained him and rolled him off the bed frame. He fell to the carpet, and someone dragged him into a corner. The concrete floor felt blissfully cold on the swelling around his eyes. He watched as the old carpet was pulled back, revealing a trapdoor that two men struggled to lift. When they’d gotten it open, they turned to him. He felt a hand under each of his armpits.

  The hole smelled musty and wet. He was thrown in headfirst, unable to break his fall because his hands were still cuffed. He lifted his head up and looked around. The walls were made of brick. The floor was mostly dirt, though remnants of rotted wooden floor planks were visible around the perimeter. When he rolled onto his back, he saw the concrete ceiling was striped with rusted bars of steel rebar. The only object in the hole was an enormous safe.

  The heavy trapdoor slammed shut. For a few seconds, rays of light seeped through the cracks where the edges of the trapdoor met the floor. Then he heard boots stomping above him and the carpet was pulled back over the door. Absolute darkness descended.

  He crawled on his bare knees through the dirt until he felt the cold metal of the safe. With his cuffed hands, he gripped the handle of it, as though it were a door to another world. The Narnia movie flashed in his disjointed memory. He’d watched part of it with his SEAL buddies in a squad-sized can at a forward operating base in Afghanistan. They’d been waiting to leave on a night mission. Guys had been checking gear, charging spare batteries, going over maps, jacking steel, and taking turns using the freezing shitter next door to rub one out. It had been
winter, in the Hindu Kush Mountains. He shivered, as if he were there now.

  Pull open the door. It’s a wardrobe that will lead to winter—no, to a beach.

  An image of South Beach, Florida, flashed through his head, and he remembered a spring break trip when he was a military cadet at Norwich University. Downing shots, awesome sloppy sex in a bathroom with a girl from Baton Rouge with huge tits, nursing a brutal hangover on the beach…

  My God, it had been so fantastically warm on that beach. The hot sand on his back, the hot sun on his face, healing him.

  He pulled on the handle to the safe, but it didn’t budge.

  22

  Almaty, Kazakhstan

  “HOLTZ WAS BEING honest with you—up to a point,” said Daria. “He was trying to help the State Department build better relationships with the Turkmen, so the US won’t get shut out of all the oil and gas deals.”

  “And helping State lobby the Turkmen on the pipeline from Iran to China.”

  “Of course. State was trying to get the Turkmen to deny transit rights.”

  “So that’s why you were there. To help stop the pipeline.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You couldn’t just let that pipeline go? After all that happened?”

  The scars on Daria’s face were partially a result of a fight over that pipeline.

  Personally, Mark didn’t care whether that oil pipeline from Iran to China got built. Iran had oil that China wanted to buy. So what? Oil was a global commodity. If China bought more from Iran, then they’d buy less from the Saudis, or the Sudanese. There’d still be the same amount of oil on the planet for everyone to fight over. And fight they would. Nothing would ever change that.

  Daria’s eyes narrowed. “That thing gets built, the mullahs get a steady stream of cash for the next thirty years. Say good-bye to any dream of a free Iran.”

  Mark wanted to say something to the effect that maybe it wasn’t her battle to fight, that maybe whether Iran ever became free was up to the people living inside the country, not her, but they’d already had that conversation, and it hadn’t ended well.

  “I admire your idealism,” he said.

  “Oh, please.”

  “So anyway, Holtz was in Turkmenistan helping State. I’m listening.”

  Daria stared him down for a moment, then said, “Having an opportunity to help stop that pipeline from getting built was a large part of why I took the job. But Holtz hadn’t been hired just to get the Turkmen to deny transit rights on the pipeline. The bigger focus was stopping the Chinese from cutting deals to lock up Turkmenistan’s natural gas reserves. The problem was the Chinese were playing dirty.”

  “I’m shocked.”

  “State had only been negotiating for two weeks when inflation in Turkmenistan started going crazy. Like, in a few days the price of everything doubled. Which meant all of a sudden Turkmenistan had a serious cash problem. The government needed money for subsidies, and quick, so people didn’t starve or revolt because they couldn’t buy food.”

  “So Turkmenistan starts looking around for a big pile of cash to solve their problems.”

  “Long-term you could say we were offering a better package deal—”

  “But the Chinese were offering more up front. For the natural gas and transit rights for the pipeline.”

  Mark had seen this movie before. In Angola, Sudan, Myanmar…throwing money at sketchy third world governments was often the way China got deals done.

  “Yeah,” said Daria. “A lot more cash. And with everyone suddenly going crazy over inflation, Turkmenistan needed cash to keep people from rioting.”

  “So’d you figure out how China rigged the inflation spike?”

  “By buying up massive amounts of black market US dollars with Turkmen manats.”

  Mark considered the implications of such a move. “That would only cause inflation if the manats being used to buy up dollars were new to the system—like if the government was printing money.” You print a lot of money, you dilute your currency, the value of the currency goes down, inflation goes up.

  “Or if someone else was printing counterfeit money.”

  Daria leaned toward Mark from across the table. Her face was animated now, in a way that reminded Mark of how she used to be, when she was just a young, overly enthusiastic operations officer.

  “I didn’t know it at the time,” she said, “but it turns out that’s exactly what was happening. Anyway, around three weeks ago, when inflation really started to run wild, I told Holtz that I suspected the Chinese were behind it. I didn’t have any real evidence yet, but the fact that inflation was mysteriously spiking just as the Chinese were preparing their cash offer was too much of a coincidence. The thing is, Holtz had just seen some intel suggesting that it was the Russians.”

  “The currency scam is too sophisticated for the Russians,” said Mark, trying to make sense of it all. “They go more for straight-up bullying. Send your damn gas and oil north through Russia or else.”

  “That’s what I thought. Holtz didn’t see it that way, though. Since we hadn’t really been getting along anyway, I quit.”

  “Huh. Just like that.”

  “Well, I figured if Holtz wasn’t going to look into it, I’d look into it on my own.”

  “Here? In Almaty?”

  “Chinese intelligence uses this city as a hub—their diplomats are always flying back and forth between here and their Central Asia stations. They usually stay at the InterContinental.”

  “What’s your end game, Daria?” Mark wasn’t sure what Daria was up to, but he was certain she was up to something. “I mean, say you get incriminating intel on the Chinese and leak it to the Turkmen. Worst-case scenario, they just have to throw more money at the problem to smooth things over.”

  Between the Chinese and the Turkmen and the currency scam and now Daria, Mark’s head was starting to spin.

  “If I can come up with proof that the Chinese were screwing with Turkmenistan’s currency, it would be worth something. It’d be intel I could sell.”

  “So you really are freelancing as a spy-for-hire. Competing against Holtz.”

  Mark hadn’t believed it when he’d heard it from Holtz.

  “Something like that. If I can find a way to slow down the China-Iran oil pipeline along the way, great. In the meantime, I have to eat. I need money to live.”

  “Fantastic. Sounds like a plan.”

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “You know, this might come as a shock to you, but I’ve actually put some thought into what I’m doing. I tried going home.”

  “For how long?”

  “Long enough.”

  “Sometimes it takes a while to really change gears.”

  “Yeah. Like you’d know.”

  “So say you get the proof you want that the Chinese are screwing with Turkmenistan’s currency. Who do you sell it to? The Americans?”

  “Or the Turkmen, or the Russians. I’d even sell it back to the Chinese if they wanted to pay me to keep it quiet.”

  Everything that Mark knew about Daria suggested she was an idealist. To a fault.

  A suicide mission to scuttle the Iran-China pipeline was right up her alley. Making money off the Chinese by selling them back incriminating intel, that was a stretch. He looked around at her dismal living quarters and reconsidered. Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe she was desperate; maybe she just really needed the money.

  “I’ve already found out enough to be worth plenty,” she said.

  Daria stood up, walked to her bedroom, and came back with a large black imitation-leather shoulder bag. From the way she was handling it, Mark could tell it was heavy. She dropped it on the table and pulled out a bound stack of brightly colored Turkmen manats. “If you add up everything in this bag, it comes to about twenty thousand dollars. All counterfeit. I have videotape of these bills being exchanged by Guoanbu agents at the InterContinental.”
r />   “You stole this from the Guoanbu?”

  “It’s not like it’s real money.”

  Mark picked up the stack of manats. The Guoanbu was China’s Ministry of State Security, their main overseas intelligence agency. They were like the CIA, only a lot meaner. Daria was playing with fire. “How can you tell they’re counterfeit?”

  “The little horse you see in the center of the Turkmen star—in the real bills it’s screwed up, but in the counterfeit bills, it’s perfect. North Korean work, I figure.”

  Mark squinted at the top bill for a bit but his eyesight wasn’t what it once was. He handed the manats back to Daria. “You think Deck got involved in any of this?”

  “He shouldn’t have. He was just there to protect State Department negotiators.”

  “But you think he did.”

  “It’s a possibility. When I think of what could have gone wrong over there, this is what comes to mind.”

  23

  WHEN DECKER WOKE up, his bare back was pressed against the cold safe and he was shivering. He wondered when he’d last had anything to eat.

  He thought back to when he was just a kid, eating pancakes in his mother’s kitchen with his dad and older brother and sister. They’d had syrup from the sugar maples in the woods out back, and lots of butter. Sunny Delight orange drink. Bacon. My God, what he would give to be able to go back, maybe take Daria with him to meet—

  Stop it.

  No more Narnia, no more South Beach, no more Daria, no more pancakes. You’re hungry. So what. Focus.

  He slid his legs through his arms, so that his cuffed hands were in front of him. Dirt had accumulated in both the entry and exit gunshot wounds on his leg, so he lowered his head and cleaned the wounds with his mouth like a dog. He spit out the dirt and kept at it until the wounds bled a bit.