The Leveling (12 page)

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.

Almaty, Kazakhstan

D
ARIA 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 visibly 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.”

Almaty, Kazakhstan

D
ARIA 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.

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.”