The Leveling

by Dan Mayland

  Mark waited for Orkhan to elaborate, but instead Orkhan just sat there looking as if he’d detected an embarrassing smell. “What other matters?” asked Mark.

  “Heydar’s bodyguard has informed me that the assassin was aiming at you, not Heydar.”

  Mark took a moment to let that bit of information sink in.

  “Of course you realized this,” said Orkhan.

  Mark hadn’t.

  “And you were wise not to try to run,” said Orkhan. “Heydar’s bodyguard had a clear shot, and you did nothing to interfere with that. Allowing professionals to do their job is often the best course of action in cases such as this. Few can resist the temptation to panic, however. You have my respect.”

  It was interesting, Mark thought, how a person could live off their résumé long after whatever skills they might have once possessed had atrophied. “The shooter probably thought I was the one guarding Heydar. And wanted to take me out first.”

  “You do not look like a bodyguard.”

  Mark couldn’t argue with that. His height was average, as was his build. Good qualities for a spy, not for a bodyguard.

  Orkhan added, “I must also tell you that the only thing the assassin was carrying, besides his gun, was a photo of you. You will not take offense, I hope, when I tell you that I was relieved. Evidently Heydar was not the target. You were.”

  4

  Kazakhstan, a Slum Outside Almaty

  FORMER CIA OPERATIONS officer Daria Buckingham strode quickly past a ramshackle street stand packed with cheap liter bottles of soda and rotgut vodka, past a stinking heap of trash—old coffee grounds and dirty diapers and apple cores and greasy auto parts—and past a cluster of small children playing in the dirt road. But she didn’t notice any of it; all she could think of was money.

  How much would she need? The number kept growing. Whatever it was, she’d find a way to get it. She’d made a lot of mistakes in her life, but she wasn’t going to screw this up.

  She turned down an alley framed by mud-brick walls and stepped over a wet trench that reeked of sewage. Though she was only a few kilometers from the modern, tree-lined center of Almaty, she was deep in the slums, in another world entirely.

  At a metal door, where kids’ plastic riding toys had been piled up in two unruly heaps on either side, she knocked.

  An old man wearing a blue flannel shirt and traditional brown tubeteika skullcap answered.

  “I’m here to see the director,” she said in Kazakh, a language she could get by in because of her fluency with Azeri, which, like Kazakh, was a Turkic language.

  Daria saw the old man fixate for a moment on her face. She wondered whether he could see the scars.

  “He’s expecting me,” she added.

  The old man stepped back, gesturing that she should follow. He led her to a small foyer. The concrete floor was pitted and stained. An open door led to a much larger room, which looked equally dreary. In the distance Daria heard a child crying and a woman’s voice rising in anger. The blue plaster walls were cracked and soiled from the waist down with grime from the hands of young children. She thought of all the little hands, and then forced herself not to. Sympathy wouldn’t help them, or her.

  “Wait here.” The old man gestured to a rickety wood school chair. “I will bring tea.”

  Forget the tea, just bring me to the director, Daria wanted to say, but she held her tongue and took a seat.

  Patience was needed in these situations, she knew. The director would be suspicious of her intentions. It would take time. She would need to sit and listen for hours for even a modicum of trust to be established.

  Her cell phone vibrated, interrupting her thoughts. A new e-mail had just come in. She glanced at the time stamp; the message had actually been sent eleven hours earlier, but with the lousy cell reception it had only just come through.

  She didn’t recognize the sender’s address, so she clicked off her phone. Whatever it was, it could wait.

  5

  Baku, Azerbaijan

  SINCE QUITTING THE CIA and taking a teaching position at Western University, he’d done a pretty good job of shutting out the chaos and confusion of the world around him—the bitter political fights, the brutal all-consuming intelligence wars, the rank corruption…he’d put all that behind him. He’d beaten that cancer.

  But now it was back.

  After a while, he asked, “May I see the photo?”

  “No,” said Orkhan. “It is with our forensic department.”

  “Was it a recent one?”

  “No. You are younger. Not so much gray.”

  “File photo or—”

  “You are walking on the street, I think. Not looking at the camera. I would guess the photo was taken by an opposition intelligence agency.”

  “The paper?”

  “Printed off a computer printer, low quality. It tells us nothing.”

  “How would an assassin have even known that I was going to be at the library this morning? I didn’t tell anyone I was going to be there.”

  “I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. Nor will it matter if we find out who tried to kill you and why—whether it was the Iranians or the Chinese or the Russians or some person you fought with years ago, the result is the same.”

  Mark waited for Orkhan to explain, but Orkhan just stared at him, so Mark asked, “What result?”

  With some discomfort, Orkhan said, “Clearly you have become a source of disturbance.”

  “I was shot at. I would say whoever shot at me was the source of the disturbance.”

  Mark recalled that the would-be assassin had been a man of about thirty, with short-cropped black hair, dark skin, and a mix of Caucasian and Asian features. The pistol the bodyguard had kicked out of the assassin’s lifeless hand was a Russian-made Makarov, but that told Mark nothing—Makarovs were a dime a dozen in the region.

  Who would want him dead? He was out of the intelligence game.

  “The incident at the library will be widely reported on. It makes it seem as if Azerbaijan is out of control.”

  “So do what you always do—pull the report from the news.”

  “Yes, of course we will do this.”

  “So?”

  “So we will do this, but Aliyev will still be unhappy.”

  “I’ll try not to let it happen again.”

  Ignoring Mark’s sarcasm, Orkhan said, “My friend…”

  Mark always got worried when Orkhan started addressing him as my friend. After all the years he’d collaborated with Orkhan—on oil deals, on ways to curtail Russian and Iranian influence in the region, on creative ways for the Americans to arm the Azeris—he’d come to realize that my friend usually meant something unpleasant was coming.

  “My friend,” repeated Orkhan, “I’m saying you need to leave.”

  “Leave where? Baku?”

  “No. Azerbaijan.”

  “For how long?” Mark figured he could lay low and do some book research in Russia for a few months. Western University wouldn’t like him taking off on such short notice—he had classes to teach, one tomorrow in fact—but there was a dearth of English-speaking professors in Baku, and he knew they’d take him back whenever they could get him.

  Orkhan got up and began to pace. Without making eye contact with Mark, he said, “Permanently.”

  “I have a valid work permit. It’s good for another six months. And the Agency likes having me here as backup. You can’t just toss me out.”

  “Your work permit has been revoked.”

  “By whom?”

  “The minister of labor.”

  Mark leaned back in his chair and stared briefly at the ceiling. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  For eleven years Baku had been his home. Eleven years. As a young man, he’d bounced around the Caucasus and Central Asia as a part of the CIA’s Special Activities Division. But then he’d been posted to Baku, and the place had quickly grown on him. The Agency had let him stay.

  Hi
s whole life—everything he had—was in Baku.

  Besides, this wasn’t exactly the first time he’d been associated with violence in Azerbaijan. And he hadn’t gotten kicked out of the country in those previous cases. Instead, he’d worked with the Azeris to resolve the problem.

  He pointed that out to Orkhan.

  “Yes, but back then you were working for your government. There would have been diplomatic consequences if we had expelled you.”

  “There may be consequences now as well.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I still have ties to the Agency.”

  “They will not be enough.”

  “What kind of time frame are we talking about here?”

  “Immediately.”

  “As in I’m notified immediately, but have a reasonable period of time to get my things together?”

  “In a few minutes you will be escorted back to your apartment to gather what you can carry, and then you will be escorted to the airport. Once the paperwork goes through, probably by later today, you will officially be a persona non grata.”

  “Jesus, Orkhan. You couldn’t give me a couple days? To fucking pack?”

  “I could not. Your furniture and other belongings will be packed for you.”

  “That’s over the top and you know it.”

  “This was my decision, but if I hadn’t made it, it would have been made for me. You understand?”

  Mark was an intensely private person. He didn’t like the thought of Orkhan’s goons rummaging through his things.

  “I’ll need to know where you want me to send your belongings. As a courtesy from my country to yours, we will pay to have them shipped wherever you like.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “Perhaps you have a relative, back in the United States?” asked Orkhan.

  Mark’s mother was dead, and his father wasn’t an option because the guy was a prick. His one living grandmother had been battling senility for years in a cheerless nursing home in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

  He thought briefly of his older sister and two younger brothers. Any one of them would probably be too polite to decline a request, but the conversation would be awkward. The last time he’d talked with any of his siblings was fifteen years ago.

  Baku was his home, his family.

  “Or a friend?” pressed Orkhan.

  Mark had plenty of colleagues from Western University with whom he was friendly. But they weren’t friends, in the true sense of the word. He was kind of on friendly terms with this young guy named John Decker, a private security contractor, and an old guy named Larry Bowlan, his first boss at the CIA, but not on such friendly terms that he felt like asking either of them to store his stuff. He briefly considered Daria Buckingham, a former lover. As far as he knew, she was still back in the States.

  “Or I could store your things here for now,” said Orkhan. “And when you are settled in your new home, you can call me and I can send them to you.”

  No, he couldn’t call Daria.

  It occurred to Mark that it was a poor reflection on his social skills for it to have come to the point where the only person he could turn to in a time of desperate need was the corrupt minister of national security from an oil-rich kleptocracy—the same person, in fact, who was throwing him out on his ass.

  “I would appreciate that.”

  6

  JOHN DECKER WOKE up in darkness again.

  He was in motion. That realization, coupled with the sound of an engine and the high-pitched squeaking of rear shocks pounding up and down right underneath his head, led him to conclude he was locked inside the trunk of a car.

  In front of him, he detected the muffled voices of several men.

  Every time the car went over a large bump or pothole, the shocks bottomed out and sent a punch-like jolt through his body.

  Assess your wounds.

  He felt his fingers, then his forearms, then his shoulders. After working his way over his entire body, he concluded that he had a massive bruise on the top of his head—and probably a concussion, given the throbbing pain and the fact that he felt like puking. His arm had small puncture wounds in it from a dog bite, and he’d been shot twice in his left leg—once up in his thigh and again just behind his shinbone.

  The bullet to his thigh had entered about six inches above his knee. Because of the placement of the exit and entry wounds, and the fact that he was alive and could still move his leg, he knew it hadn’t struck bone. The bullet to his shin had grazed the bone but hadn’t shattered it. He didn’t remember taking that hit. Someone must have tagged him just as he was jumping off the roof of the mansion. That would explain why he’d screwed up the landing.

  He also determined that he must have been knocked out for quite a while, because both wounds had stopped bleeding on their own. His thigh muscle had tightened up into a rock-hard knot that ached like hell.

  The pounding in his head made it hard to think. His training told him that he should be trying to notice details, trying to figure out where he was being taken.

  You’re going up. The road is bumpy. Lots of turns.

  He remembered the e-mail he’d sent to Mark and Daria. He’d only managed to attach three photos to it. There hadn’t been time for more.

  Decker briefly thought of Daria with a sense of longing, then stopped himself.

  He thought again of the e-mail he’d sent. If he’d been on the receiving end of it, he’d have sent it right to the trash with the rest of his spam. After all, he’d sent it from an address neither Mark nor Daria would recognize. But Mark had been one of the CIA’s best spies and Daria was no slouch either. They were trained to notice things that most people didn’t.

  But even if they looked at the photos, what then?

  Mark will use people, like he once used you. He knows how to leverage his power. God knows, he can be a mean son of a bitch when he needs to be.

  Decker closed his eyes.

  But even if Mark makes sense of the photos, you’ll still be screwed.

  Decker had sent Mark and Daria those photos so that the evidence he’d collected wouldn’t be lost forever. Not to save his own ass. He’d gotten himself into this mess, and it was up to him to get himself out. He had no overwatch looking out for him, no tracker telling backup where he was.

  The car was climbing a moderate incline, straining the engine.

  Decker thought back to Hell Week at Coronado, when he’d trained to be a SEAL. He’d punished his body beyond what he thought was possible, swimming for hours in freezing salt water, staying awake for the better part of five days…He’d cracked four ribs falling off an obstacle course, but he’d kept going because the only thing worse than soldiering on was the thought of quitting. One hundred and three guys in kick-ass shape had started off in his BUDS class that week, but only twenty-two had made it to the end. And of those twenty-two, only fifteen had made it through the rest of the training to become full-fledged SEALs.

  Even after getting tossed from the teams—he’d disobeyed a direct order, a bullshit order that he was pretty sure had been issued because he’d screwed his squad leader’s wife without knowing who she was—he’d always been proud that he’d been part of that group of fifteen, had worn it like a badge of honor.

  His thoughts turned back to the present, and what would happen next. His captors would question him, which was probably the only reason he was still alive.

  Probe for weakness. Remember your training.

  Code of Conduct. Article III. If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape…

  Decker ran his hands inch by inch over the entire interior of the trunk, searching for, but not finding, a cable that might release the lock. He did, however, locate the back sides of the rear seats. On one of them, he felt the imprint of a body. The springs on that seat squeaked whenever the car went over a bump. That squeak, combined with the loud banging of the rear shocks, wasn’t doing anything to
help his splitting headache.

  Be patient. But don’t wait for the perfect moment to make your move because the perfect moment may never come.

  Decker adjusted his six-foot-four frame so that one shoulder was lightly touching the back side of the occupied rear seat and his feet were planted on the opposite wall of the trunk. The pain in his wounded thigh was searing. His neck was crimped and he wished he were a foot shorter.

  His first explosive push blasted the seat forward a foot. On his second push, Decker threw the rear passenger halfway into the front seat.

  The car swerved, and the driver and everyone else in the car started shouting at each other. Decker kept ramming forward until he’d flattened the rear seat. Then he pistoned his shoulder into the small of a skinny man’s back. The car skidded to a stop. Decker lunged for the skinny man’s neck and twisted until he heard a crack.

  It was bright outside, possibly early morning. Through the windshield Decker caught a glimpse of craggy, barren hills and a roadside bakery where flatbread was stacked high in baskets out front.

  A big man in the front passenger seat rolled out of the car. The driver was in a panic, trying to unlock the safety on his gun. Decker pulled himself completely out of the trunk and into the backseat of the car, then lunged for the throat of the man with the gun.

  Someone grabbed his legs from the back of the trunk just as a bearded guy yanked open the car’s rear doors and started smashing Decker’s face with the butt of an AK-47. Decker felt a second set of hands on his legs—this time, right on his bullet wound.

  A young guy in a white shirt ran out of the bakery and into the road, yelling something that Decker couldn’t understand. The guy with the AK-47 fired a few shots in the air and the man in the white shirt stopped short.

  Decker was dragged out of the car. Once on the ground, four men who’d evidently been traveling close behind in a backup car began to kick him. He grabbed hold of the leg of the tallest of his assailants, threaded an arm around the man’s knee, twisted until he heard a snap, used his thumb to gouge the man’s eye as he fell, and then crushed the man’s esophagus with a fist to the throat. Someone kicked road gravel into Decker’s face, temporarily blinding him, but he grabbed another assailant’s leg and threw a fist up into the guy’s balls.