The Leveling

by Dan Mayland

  Zemin tipped his head in acknowledgment. Then he ordered one of the soldiers to get the cow down from the pickup truck and set it free to graze in the surrounding grassland.

  His inspection of the site was perfunctory. The men who had been killed in the raid were Chinese Uighur separatists who had been harbored by the Taliban, then driven by the Afghan government across the border into Turkmenistan.

  As Zemin was paging through a Qur’an that had belonged to one of the separatists, checking it for handwritten codes that the military might have missed, a call came through on his satellite phone. When he saw where it was from, he excused himself and walked alone back to his stripped-down Chinese-made Hafei minitruck.

  He picked up the phone, spoke his name, and then listened to the circumstances of John Decker’s escape and recapture.

  “I must also inform you that the interrogation is not going well,” said the caller. “My men are not properly trained for such work.”

  “Perhaps it is possible to get men that are?” Zemin was careful not to let sarcasm seep into his tone.

  “Certainly. But not men that I trust. Understand, I did not anticipate that you would be followed. Had I known this to be a possibility, I would have made different arrangements.”

  I did not anticipate you would be followed.

  Over the years, Zemin had learned to consider his emotions as he might a wild dog on the street, as something outside of himself that one should keep an eye on but not be controlled by.

  But the American John Decker had followed him. That Zemin couldn’t deny.

  And that failure had been compounded by the Guoanbu’s inability to contain Sava. Yet.

  “I will have two men for you within twenty-four hours,” said Zemin.

  “Set a flight plan for Tehran, divert to Karaj. I’ll have them met at the airport so they won’t need to go through customs.”

  42

  DECKER WAS BROUGHT back to the house from which he’d escaped, stripped, and thrown to the basement floor. His hands were once again handcuffed and his legs bound with rope. Two armed guards stood over him at all times. After a few hours, a two-man crew arrived carrying an enormous drill with an eighteen-inch bit attached to it. Decker worried for a moment that it was to be used on him, but the men just pulled up the trapdoor and descended a ladder into the pit. He heard the high-pitched whine of what sounded like the drill piercing metal.

  The man in the black turban came down to the basement just after the men with the drill had emerged from the pit.

  “I have made new arrangements for you.”

  Decker ignored him, as he always did. He kept his eyes focused on the arabesque swirls in the carpet, trying to shut down his ability to hear.

  “You will have new friends soon. Look at me!”

  Decker pretended that he was still outside, climbing a mountain.

  Someone kicked him in the stomach.

  Orders were given, prompting one of the men to throw Decker face-first down the steps into the pit. He saw that the hole he’d dug out had been filled in. And that the door to the safe was open. A guard followed him down and tried to grab him under the armpits, but Decker was feeling stronger from the food and drink, and as he stood he twisted and head-butted the guard in the nose.

  The guard was taken by surprise and fell back. Decker was on him instantly, using his head like a sledgehammer to pound the man’s face.

  It was futile, though. The guard had no gun to steal, and two more guards were in the pit within seconds. Though they beat the hell out of him, Decker didn’t regret it. If he was capable of fighting back, he’d fight.

  Keep pushing.

  The guards threw him into the safe and stuffed his legs up into his chest.

  Decker screamed. The pain in his wounded leg was unbearable. He was shaking uncontrollably. The interior walls of the safe pressed against his shoulders. Even with his knees touching his chest, he barely fit in the space.

  As the door clanged shut and blackness descended, Decker put his mouth next to one of the air holes that had been drilled through the thick metal. He closed his eyes and began to count again. He was climbing, slowly, steadily, one foot after the other. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the air was clean.

  43

  Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

  DARIA MANEUVERED THE Niva through the crowds outside the Tolkuchka Bazaar. Manhandling the stick shift and honking the horn at everyone who got in front of her helped dissipate some of her anger.

  When they reached the road back to Ashgabat, she said, “Holtz was lying about firing me, you know. I don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”

  “What bars did Deck hang out at here in Ashgabat?”

  “You don’t believe me about Holtz, do you?” she asked.

  “I believe you.”

  “No, you don’t. But you should. I know you don’t think much of me—”

  “That’s not true.”

  “People change, Mark. I wouldn’t stoop that low. Not to make money for a piece of shit like Holtz, anyway. You know, he probably told the State Department people the same lie he just told you, just to spite me because I quit.”

  “Holtz is a bottom-feeder. There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s just the way he is.”

  Daria thought Mark sounded bored by Holtz’s lies. Bored. Which told her exactly where things stood between them. She glanced at him. His eyes looked even more heavy lidded and deep set than usual. He hadn’t shaved in days. It was hard for her to believe that this was the same professorial guy who’d spent over a month nursing her back to health.

  She pulled open the dash compartment. “Jesus, I need a cigarette.” She rifled through some papers but came up short.

  “When did you start smoking?”

  “A week ago, as part of my cover.”

  “Forget Holtz. He’s just trying to get inside your head. Don’t let him.”

  She wanted to blurt out that it wasn’t Holtz that was getting inside her head, it was him. It was being close to him, without really being close. Talking to him, without really talking.

  She considered what little she knew about him, starting with the fact that Mark Sava wasn’t even his real name.

  He’d always been guarded, especially about his past. But once he had let slip—this a month into their relationship—that he’d grown up in a run-down neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and had gone to public schools there. When she’d gone back to the States, she’d done some snooping and hadn’t been able to find any record of him in Elizabeth. At least not until she’d paged through several old public school yearbooks and discovered that he’d grown up not as Mark Sava, but rather Marko Saveljic. That had thrown her for a loop. CIA operations officers used aliases all the time, but Mark had been a station chief when he’d left the CIA; he’d been declared to the Azeris and shouldn’t have needed to use an alias. At the very least, once they’d become intimate, Daria thought he should have mentioned what his real name was. She’d also learned—from an obituary on file with a local newspaper—that Mark’s mother had died when he was in his teens.

  She tried to imagine him as a young kid, before his mom had died, before life had roughed him up. She tried to picture him as a normal, innocent child playing with his older sister and two younger brothers, climbing on jungle gyms and running through sprinklers.

  Back when they’d been living together in his apartment, she might have been able to imagine it. But now? No way. All she saw was a serious kid, back to the wall, sizing up every other kid in the sandbox as he looked for weaknesses to exploit, angles to work. His mind packed with dark secrets. She had no doubt his mom’s death had been a hard blow, but she guessed it was a blow that, if anything, had just pushed him in a direction he’d already been going.

  “So are you going to answer my question?” asked Mark, interrupting her thoughts.

  “You had one?”

  He was a strange man, Daria thought, born with a rare ability to separate his life i
nto distinct and often contradictory compartments, some of which he’d shared with her, most of which he hadn’t and, she was sure, never would.

  “Bars. Decker. Where did he hang out? Focus, Daria.”

  Daria downshifted as she entered a traffic circle. The transmission whined. “I know Holtz wouldn’t let him drink at the President, so we can cross that off the list. He took me out to the Grand Turkmen once. We could start there.”

  Daria remembered an awkward night. Polite dinner conversation, mostly about how crazy Turkmenistan was—Beards outlawed! Compulsory hockey! Bubonic plague! Decker had been nervous during dinner. They’d both had too much wine. Afterward, he’d pulled her onto a nearly empty dance floor. A cringe-inducing gyration to “Tainted Love” with a disco ball right out of Saturday Night Fever spinning above them had followed. They’d played blackjack for an hour at the casino. He’d won—she remembered him high-fiving her and that it hurt—and she’d lost, badly.

  “They have a bar at the Grand Turkmen?” asked Mark.

  “It’s part of the restaurant.”

  Then there was that good-night kiss that she’d been a little too boozy to deflect and that had made her feel as if she were being mauled by a bear.

  Objectively, she knew that Deck was a seriously handsome guy, with a body that really was a marvel to behold. She loved looking at him. And she liked him on a personal level—a lot. She’d never seen him in a bad mood, and that counted for something. But she was barely five feet tall and he was six foot four. And he was still in his twenties, with the cares and concerns of a guy in his twenties. What he needed was a young buxom Russian weightlifter who liked to pound shots and trade punches. And that just wasn’t her.

  They tried the Grand Turkmen Hotel, then the Nissa Hotel, and then a few of the seedier joints like the Vavilov and the Mopra Club—tired places with stained carpets, stale air, and watered-down drinks. Mark always started by ordering something at the bar and grossly overtipping. Then Daria would show the bartender a photo she’d taken of Decker on their night out together.

  No one recognized him, or would admit to it. As soon as they were sure a place was a bust, they’d leave in a hurry, without finishing their drinks.

  They tried seedier places still, until Daria had the sense that she’d fallen into a toilet and was slowly circling the bowl. But that’s when they started to get some real hits.

  At the Flamingo Disco, an expat-German waitress with pierced eyebrows and a cattle-style nose ring remembered Deck, though she said he’d only been in a couple of times and had hung out more at the bar than on the dance floor.

  At the City Pub—where the guy watching the door informed Daria that if she was there as a whore, she’d need to give the house a percentage of her take—they seemed to know Decker well. He evidently was a big tipper who’d been known to buy rounds for everyone at the bar, on multiple occasions. But no one had heard anything about his taking off with one of the bartenders. An offer of one hundred, then two hundred dollars for more information didn’t jog anyone’s memory.

  “Try the British Pub,” the bartender told them on the way out. “I know he used to hang out there too.”

  44

  Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

  NO SIGN HUNG outside the basement-level British Pub, just a coat of arms on a nondescript door. Inside, faded pictures of a young John Lennon and Paul McCartney lined the entrance foyer. Dark curtains hung over fake windows. When Mark’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom, he saw a sitting area near the entrance where two women—prostitutes, he guessed—were chatting on one of several couches. A bar with mirrored shelves displayed a meager selection of foreign booze under purple lights. Brick-patterned wallpaper had been pasted on the floor-to-ceiling columns near the bar. A dartboard hung on a nearby pine-paneled wall that was riddled with dart holes. Farther in was a band area, then a billiard table, its stained baize more shit brown than green.

  It was one thirty in the afternoon. Aside from the prostitutes and the staff, the pub was empty.

  Mark ordered a beer, overtipping as usual.

  Daria stuck with bottled water and showed the bartender—a big Russian with a facial tick—her photo of Decker.

  “He drinks Tuborg?”

  Mark glanced at the beer menu to the side of the bar. Tuborg was the cheapest. And it came in half-liter bottles. It also happened to be what he was drinking. “Yeah.”

  “The Decker!” The bartender’s face twitched as he smiled.

  “That’s him,” said Mark.

  “He is here all the time, he loves the karaoke.”

  “I wasn’t aware.”

  “Very good singer. Very good, just like the Meat Loaf.”

  Mark raised his eyebrows and exchanged a look with Daria. “Have you seen him recently?”

  “Not since many days, I think.”

  The bartender added that Decker had often bought rounds of drinks for everyone at the bar. And that he was a good tipper and extremely popular with the female waitresses. And that he also sometimes hung out at the Flamingo disco next door.

  “Sounds like he was the life of the party,” said Mark, wondering how much of the Decker party-guy routine was a just calculated act—a way for Decker to quickly learn far more about what was going on in Ashgabat than he could hanging around with fusty State Department diplomats—and how much of it was just that Decker liked a good time. Fifty-fifty, Mark guessed.

  “Yes, of course, all the time.”

  The bartender started washing glasses in his utility sink.

  “By any chance was he friends with one of the bartenders here?” Mark wrote Alty8@online.tm on a bar napkin. “Or someone who used this e-mail address.”

  The bartender frowned and stopped washing. “Alty was another bartender here.”

  “Was?”

  “He quit around the same time I last saw the Decker.”

  “Quit?”

  “He didn’t show up for work.”

  “Do you have any idea where he is now?” said Mark.

  “No.”

  “Know anyone that might?”

  The Walk of Health, as it was called, was a wide concrete path that wound for over twenty miles through the desolate hills just south of Ashgabat. It had been built at great expense to promote exercise, but except for the one day each year when all government employees were required to hike the thing from beginning to end, no one actually used it. Which is why Mark had wanted to meet there, so that he could be sure that Alty’s brother—a man named Atamyrat Nuriyev—had come alone.

  They converged on the path about a mile south of the Eternally Great Park, where the path started. Mark approached from the north—after hiking cross-country to reach the path; Nuriyev from the southern park entrance.

  Before speaking, Mark studied Nuriyev.

  The drooping shoulders and hangdog look suggested that Nuriyev had no news or bad news regarding his missing younger brother; the cheap domestic suit told him that Nuriyev’s government job—assistant to the minister of culture—hadn’t translated into any real power for him; the plastic digital wristwatch he wore, which he’d probably bought for a dollar at the Tolkuchka Bazaar, confirmed this; the broad flat face and almond-shaped eyes told him that Nuriyev was a native Turkmen and not a Russian transplant, which in turn suggested that Nuriyev had grown up dirt-poor during the long Soviet occupation.

  Still, Nuriyev was of average height, so he likely hadn’t grown up so poor that his growth had been stunted as a child. His relatively clear complexion suggested that he didn’t smoke and hadn’t adopted the Russian predilection for extreme drinking. And the fact that he hadn’t bought a fake Rolex wristwatch for two dollars, also on sale at the Tolkuchka Bazaar and popular with many Turkmen, suggested a personal modesty.

  It was the watch that made Mark decide he would try being honest with Nuriyev. “Thank you for coming so quickly.” Mark spoke the greeting in Turkmen, with what he knew was a heavy Azeri accent.

  Nuriyev had removed his govern
ment-gray suit jacket, revealing sweat stains underneath his armpits. His pressed suit pants were an inch too long and the cuffs grazed the ground. Mark was sweating too. He’d climbed three miles to get to their meeting spot, much of it up steep slopes. By now it was three in the afternoon, and the sun was intense. Nuriyev had come straight from work.

  Far below them, Ashgabat, hazy and bright, rose out of the desert. A couple of helicopters circled over the city center; evidence, Mark thought, of a security crackdown following the shooting of the Turkmen soldier.

  Nuriyev acknowledged Mark with a nod, but didn’t speak. Mark wasn’t surprised. Even in normal situations, most Turkmen were usually so reserved that they made their former Russian overlords look positively friendly—no easy task.

  Mark kept both his hands in front of him and in sight so as not to give Nuriyev cause to worry.

  After he’d rested a moment, Mark launched into an explanation about Decker, how the cryptic e-mail he’d received had contained the name Alty in it, and how he’d wound up at the British Pub. At the bazaar he’d needed to speak slowly for the merchants to understand him, so he took care to speak slowly now. Eventually, he took out Daria’s phone and clicked open the first of the three photos that had been sent by Alty8. Nuriyev studied it for a moment, but it was as though he were staring through the photo, not really seeing it. Mark clicked on the next one, then the next. “Do these mean anything to you?”

  Instead of answering, Nuriyev said, “Alty is my youngest brother.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “He’s only eighteen years old. My family has not heard from him in four days.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  For the first time, Nuriyev looked Mark right in the eye. “Your colleague shouldn’t have used my brother.”

  “What are you talking about?”