The Leveling

by Dan Mayland

  “I know these things. Your colleague, he’s a CIA spy.”

  “No he isn’t.”

  “I’m not stupid.”

  Mark turned back toward Ashgabat and spent the next half hour explaining everything he knew about why Decker had been in Turkmenistan—the counterfeit money, the rivalry between the United States and China and Russia, CAIN’s role, how Decker and Alty had wound up working together…he didn’t hold back a thing.

  At one point Nuriyev put his hand up, as if to say stop, you are telling me that which I should not be allowed to hear. But Mark kept talking. He figured he had nothing to lose. The secrets he was divulging weren’t ones he’d been charged with keeping.

  He finished by telling Nuriyev that he, Mark, used to work for the CIA but no longer did. And that anyway, the CIA wasn’t the all-powerful force that Nuriyev seemed to think it was.

  “Even if your colleague wasn’t working for the CIA, he used my brother in an investigation that was paid for by the US government. My brother is eighteen years old. He should not have been involved. Your government used him. This John Decker used him.”

  Nuriyev spoke emphatically, but with his sweaty shirt and rumpled hair, he looked unsure of himself. A hot breeze started blowing and his shirt billowed up.

  Mark was thirsty. Which made him think of another time when he’d been thirsty.

  A few days after Decker had showed up in Baku, looking for a place to stay, Mark had needed to drive out to the mountains west of the city, to interview a 102-year-old Azeri man who’d worked with Soviet intelligence in the 1920s. It was research for his book. Mark had been reluctant when Decker asked to come along, but Decker had proved to be a decent traveling companion—he’d just bought a copy of Interview with the Vampire from a secondhand bookstore in Baku, and had read for most of the car ride out. Which had been fine with Mark—small talk annoyed him.

  The only problem was that the final seven-mile stretch of road to the village where the old man lived had washed out the week before. Finishing the journey on foot wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that Mark took a wrong turn early on—a mistake he only figured out after he and Decker had been climbing for three hours. They’d been forced to slog back down the way they came. And then start up the right trail.

  The thing was, Mark had been sweating like crazy, and he hadn’t packed any water for the trip. After several hours of hard hiking, Decker had offered him his half-full water bottle. Mark had refused it at first, but Decker had insisted that he didn’t need it because he had a second one in his pack.

  Mark had been grateful for that water. But then he realized he’d never seen Decker pull out a second bottle. So when they finally got to the village, and Decker went to take a leak, Mark had opened Deck’s backpack. There was no other water bottle. Decker had given away his only one.

  Mark had never mentioned the incident, but he thought about it now. A guy who would give his only water bottle away to a jackass who had just led him hours up a wrong trail wasn’t the kind of guy who would intentionally screw over an eighteen-year-old kid.

  Mark turned to Nuriyev.

  “Did Decker know how young Alty was? Would Alty have told him?” Mark let that sit for a moment. “Listen, my colleague and your brother are missing. My government won’t lift a finger to help get them back and neither will yours. I’m trying to help on my own.”

  After seeming to consider Mark’s remarks for a while, Nuriyev finally said, “When Alty started working at the British Pub, he became obsessed with all things foreign. And the more he learned, the more unhappy he became in his own country.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Those photos you showed me. I believe they were taken with Alty’s iPhone. I told Alty the phone was a stupid waste of money, but he insisted on buying it.”

  “Was it a new iPhone?” Mark remembered that Daria had said the quality of the photos was poor.

  “No. Used. He didn’t have money for a new one.”

  They stood in silence for a long time. Eventually Mark said, “You said you haven’t heard from your brother in four days.”

  Nuriyev didn’t respond.

  “But the bartender at the British Pub said Alty has been gone for a week.”

  “He wanted me to try to save his job. To make an excuse for him. So he called me. That was the last time I heard from him.”

  “Where was he when he called?”

  “Iran.”

  “Where in Iran?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was my colleague with him?”

  Nuriyev sighed. “Come, we must drive to south, toward the mountains.”

  45

  Washington, DC

  THE MEETING HAD been dragging on for hours. Hundreds of aim points had been considered. Most were easy to approve—radar installations, Revolutionary Guard bases, anti-aircraft batteries…it only took fifteen seconds a slide on average, but every so often they hit a hard one.

  “Aim point one thousand sixty-seven,” said the secretary of defense. An address in Esfahan, Iran, came up on the white-board. “Home of Dr. Farid Kermani. Director of the Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center.”

  “He lives in a housing complex,” said the national security advisor, “so there is a certainty of civilian casualties, perhaps significant. The complex is located within a quarter mile of the Khaju Bridge, which is around four hundred years old and a big tourist site. If we screw up and hit that bridge, we’ll suffer serious backlash beyond what we’re already in for.”

  “How many individuals are on the aim point list?” asked the president.

  “Eight, beginning with Dr. Kermani. They represent our best estimate of what constitutes the top nuclear minds in the country. If we can eliminate these people from the equation, the Iranians could be set back several years on top of the time it will take them to rebuild the infrastructure damage we’ll inflict.”

  “This is one of the many reasons why we’re not consulting with the Europeans,” added the national security advisor. “We choose the aim points, we take all the blame and all the backlash. We’ll get hammered for it, and it might mean we’ll be ceding the initiative on some foreign policy goals for the next few years, but we’ll just have to live with that. It’s better than the alternative. Aim point accepted.”

  Everyone else concurred.

  “Aim point confirmed,” said the president.

  46

  Turkmenistan, Near the Border with Iran

  MARK AND NURIYEV drove south in Nuriyev’s old white Volga toward the foothills of the Kopet Dag Mountains, which paralleled the border with Iran. It was desolate country, dotted with only occasional clusters of small houses, and the scorched hills made Mark long for the relative luxury of his apartment in Baku.

  After a half hour they turned down a dirt road where chickens roamed free. The little whitewashed houses all had rusting corrugated-metal roofs with satellite dishes nailed haphazardly to their sides. Laundry lines had been strung between stunted palm trees.

  Nuriyev pulled up to the last house on the street. A shiny blue BMW 3 Series was parked out front, and two little girls were chasing a big cream-colored Alabai dog and laughing. Nearby a camel poked its head out from a backyard that had been fenced in with old doors.

  Nuriyev announced that they’d arrived at his uncle’s house. And that his uncle was a smuggler.

  “Of?”

  “Mostly alcohol and Western cigarettes. That they bring to Iran.”

  Mark wondered what ‘mostly’ meant.

  “They have—”

  “Who is they?”

  “My uncle and his family. They have an arrangement with the border guards.” Nuriyev muscled the steering wheel as he parked. “If Alty crossed into Iran, he may have turned to them for help.”

  As they approached the house, a stooped old man appeared in the front door, beneath a cluster of dried chili peppers that had been nailed to the top of the doorframe for good luck. Although it was hot out, he w
ore a long-sleeved Turkmen robe under a soiled North Face vest. His face was creased with deep wrinkles, his mouth set in an unfriendly frown.

  Nuriyev put his right hand over his heart and dipped his head a bit.

  The old man didn’t reciprocate. After standing in the doorway for a while, as if to block their entrance, he simply said, “Well, you must come in for tea.” He turned, with little enthusiasm, into the house.

  In the main room, floor pillows, shiny with hair grease, ringed a large red Turkmen carpet. Mark detected the smell of both cigarette and opium smoke. In a corner, an intricately carved opium pipe sat next to a paraffin lamp. The sole piece of furniture was a low table, reinforced with several pieces of scrap wood, on top of which sat a decent-sized LCD Sony television. A boy of about ten sat in front of it, watching two American professional wrestlers beat each other over the head with chairs.

  Nuriyev’s uncle gestured to the floor. “Sit.” He called loudly for tea, and his wife appeared, wearing a bright yellow-and-blue headscarf. Behind her stood the two girls who’d been chasing the dog on the street.

  Mark wondered whether Decker had visited this house. He scanned the room for signs of Deck as Nuriyev and his uncle discussed the price of cottonseed oil and the recent inflation crisis.

  “He likes us to smoke,” said Nuriyev in halting English, interrupting Mark’s thoughts.

  “I quit cigarettes,” responded Mark, also switching to English.

  “He means the opium.”

  Even if staying sharp hadn’t been a factor, which it was, Mark didn’t trust himself with opiates. It had been over twenty years ago, but for a short time he had been a heroin addict—the result of being abducted and interrogated for months on end by the KGB. The idea had been to get him hooked and then withhold the drug to entice him to talk. The tactic would have worked if he’d had anything of value to tell his captors. Since then he’d stayed away from the stuff.

  “Tell him I’m sick and that tea will be more than enough.”

  Sounding embarrassed, Nuriyev said, “I already tell him I am sick.”

  “Then I guess I caught what you had.”

  Nuriyev’s uncle looked unhappy about the refusal. Mark figured the old man needed his fix but didn’t want to violate some unwritten rule of hospitality by smoking alone. The tea soon came, brought out in a metal thermos. Mark accepted a cup and a cube of sugar.

  Switching back to Turkmen, Nuriyev said, “I must tell you this is not entirely a social visit, Uncle. Do you remember my brother Alty?”

  Nuriyev’s uncle placed three cubes of sugar into his tea and listened with a bored look on his face as Nuriyev launched into a mostly fictional account of why he thought his brother may have crossed into Iran.

  “Have you seen him recently?” asked Nuriyev.

  His uncle began to cough, and then he took a Camel cigarette—a rare luxury in Turkmenistan—from a pack that lay on the floor by his feet. “Your father is a stubborn man.” He rolled the cigarette between his tobacco-stained thumb and index finger. “Surely you know that he would not allow Alty to visit us.”

  “I am here.”

  “And does your father know?”

  “I am not my father.”

  Nuriyev’s uncle lit his cigarette with a wooden match, which he then blew out and carefully placed on top of an overflowing ashtray. “I have not seen your brother. If I do, I will send word.”

  “What about Murat?”

  “My son has not seen Alty either.”

  “They used to be friends.”

  “Your father ended that.”

  The power went off, causing Nuriyev’s uncle to yell something about a generator to his wife. Then he turned to Mark. “Every day at this time the electricity goes off. But does it ever go off in Ashgabat? No, there they have all the electricity they want. Nobody cares about the villages.” A minute later a loud engine started rumbling, the television came back on, and the house began to smell of diesel exhaust.

  “Alty told me that Murat came to see him at the British Pub one year ago,” said Nuriyev. “They have been in contact since then, I’m sure of it.”

  The old man took a sip of his tea.

  Nuriyev said, “I need you to ask Murat about Alty.”

  “You don’t tell me what I need to do.”

  Nuriyev lowered his head. After a time he said, “I am not telling you, I am asking you, Uncle. I am asking you to help me.”

  Mark waited a moment for Nuriyev’s uncle to respond. But the old Turkmen just sat there smoking like some debauched Buddha, so Mark stood up.

  “Enough of this crap,” he said in English. With one kick, he sent the old man’s tea thermos and pack of Camel cigarettes sailing across the room. The thermos hit the far wall and splattered tea everywhere, and the cigarettes flew out of their box. Switching to Turkmen, he said, “I’m here as an observer from the United Nations, as part of a group that is monitoring opium trafficking. Alty is important to us, for reasons I don’t intend to discuss with you. If you want to stay in business, you’ll help us find him. If you don’t, I’ll have your pathetic smuggling operation shut down tomorrow.”

  The room went silent.

  Nuriyev looked utterly appalled at what Mark had done. To his uncle he said, “I did not come here with the intention of interfering with your business.”

  “I only trade alcohol now,” muttered Nuriyev’s uncle. Mark observed the old man’s fingers shaking slightly as he took a long drag off his cigarette.

  Wagging his finger, Mark said, “I can tell you this—nobody gives a donkey’s ass about your business right now. But they will soon if you don’t answer the questions.”

  The old man turned to Nuriyev. “You bring this filth into my home?”

  “Get Murat,” said Mark.

  At that moment the front door opened. A stunted, emaciated young man of about twenty, with the same olive skin and almond-shaped eyes as Nuriyev, appeared. He wore a button-down short-sleeve polyester dress shirt and an old World Wide Wrestling Federation baseball cap that accentuated his big ears. Mark noticed his thumb and index finger were tobacco stained, like the old man’s.

  “Leave, boy!”

  Murat dismissed the old man’s order with a disgusted wave of his hand. “Come,” he said to Nuriyev and Mark. “I heard what you need.”

  “Did you help Alty cross to Iran?” asked Nuriyev.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “I knew it,” said Nuriyev. “Alty denied it when I asked him, but I knew if he made it to Iran, you must have helped him.”

  “My father’s brain doesn’t work right anymore. All he does is smoke all day. I have run the business myself for the past two years.”

  “Murat!”

  Murat gestured to his father. “He knows it’s true. And he knows I helped Alty and an American cross the border—last I heard they are in Mashhad.”

  Mark had never been to Mashhad, but he knew it was close to the border with Turkmenistan and one of Iran’s most important cities. Millions of devout pilgrims flocked to it each year to visit a holy shrine in the center of the city. Which meant Decker would have been ridiculously conspicuous there. The image was almost comical.

  “When was this?” asked Mark.

  “Four days ago. They crossed in a supply truck, on one of our regular runs.”

  Mark counted the days back in his head. The photo of the man in the black turban exchanging a briefcase with Li Zemin—the one sent from Alty’s iPhone—must have been taken in Mashhad.

  “My colleague is a big man,” said Mark.

  “A giant!” said Murat with enthusiasm. “My brother thought he was a wrestler. Like maybe the brother of Edge.”

  “How would such a man go unnoticed?”

  Murat shrugged. “He was not unnoticed. I paid the border guards a percentage of the money your friend gave me, so there was no problem.”

  “Were they supposed to come back?”

  “The next day.”

  “What happened?�
��

  “Alty called from Mashhad. He said there was a delay and he’d call again when he needs me. Then I don’t hear from him.”

  “Where in Mashhad was he staying?” asked Mark.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Where was he going after Mashhad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mark took out Daria’s phone and brought up the photo of a man in the black turban exchanging a briefcase with Li Zemin. “This photo was taken by either my colleague or by Alty. From what you just told me, and by the time stamp on this photo, it must have been while they were in Mashhad. Do you recognize the man in the black turban?”

  Murat studied it. “No.”

  “How much to smuggle me and an associate into Iran?”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “No, there was a shooting in Ashgabat today. There will be more security on the borders. And the time, it’s late, too late to arrange.”

  Mark checked the sun. He estimated it was around four thirty. But the border was close, he knew. No more than an hour away. “I can’t wait.”

  Murat shrugged. “Then three thousand dollars. One way. This is double what it usually costs. Today there will be more people to pay, and if you want to leave today I must offer more money. Even so, it will take some time to arrange.”

  “How much time?”

  “I don’t know, maybe an hour, maybe two. I will tell you where to meet your driver and I will bring him there as soon as I can.”

  “I’ll also need you to exchange four thousand dollars of manats into Iranian rials for me.”

  Murat smiled. His teeth were deteriorating where they met his gums. “OK.” He named a price that included a five-hundred-dollar service charge for himself. Mark let it go. There was a time to bargain and a time to pony up.

  47

  Washington, DC

  THE PRESIDENT LEANED forward and rested both forearms on his desk in the Oval Office, exhausted after sitting through the four-hour targeting meeting in the situation room on only two hours of sleep. And it was only nine in the morning. He still had the whole day ahead of him.