The Leveling

by Dan Mayland

  “Get out!” yelled Mark in English. He yanked the door open and pulled the man to the pavement. More gunshots rang out.

  Daria reached the car and climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Stand in the center of the road with your hands up,” said Mark.

  When the man didn’t move, Daria repeated the command in Farsi.

  “Tell him to stand with his hands up and not to run, or he’ll get shot,” said Mark.

  Daria did, and the man raised his hands above his head, shaking as he did so. Mark got behind the wheel, deftly turned the car around, and slammed his foot on the accelerator.

  49

  Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

  LI ZEMIN UNBUTTONED his pants and loosened his belt just enough to allow himself freedom of movement. He loosened his tie and unfastened the top two buttons on his dress shirt.

  The blinds were closed inside his spacious corner office at the Chinese embassy in Ashgabat, and the light was dim.

  By the time he got to the twenty-fourth tai chi chuan posture—White Crane Spreads Its Wings—he was just beginning to perspire. So he was irritated when his routine was disturbed by a call from one of his field operatives.

  “There was an incident.”

  “An incident?” repeated Zemin.

  “We believe Sava has crossed into Iran.”

  Zemin listened carefully as he was told about the debacle at the border. Before hanging up, he noted, “This will affect your standing within the directorate.”

  Zemin sat down in his chair, legs spread apart, and ran a hand through his hair.

  The situation had not been contained. He had to assume the worst. Which meant he would need to speak to his uncle, the fat general. In person, in Beijing.

  There was no other way.

  50

  Quchan, Iran

  ONE MOMENT THEY were speeding across the empty desert and the next they were careening into a roundabout on the edge of the city of Quchan. Mark pulled off onto a side street lined with factory buildings and crumbling walls painted with advertisements for kitchen appliances.

  The factories soon gave way to a mix of well-maintained apartment buildings and shops. It was nine o’clock, and the streets were crowded with people out walking and doing their shopping. Some of the women wore chadors, but many just wore jeans and headscarves that barely covered their hair. They passed a pizza shop, a hardware store, clothing boutiques, and an electronics store packed with televisions and digital cameras and cell phones. After the bizarre white-marble sterility of downtown Ashgabat, Mark was struck by how normal it all looked.

  He kept both hands on the steering wheel, still on full alert.

  “Assess our current situation,” he said to Daria. He’d never been to eastern Iran before. But Daria had, many times.

  Her chador had slipped from her head, and the black headscarf underneath had come loose. She tightened it with a few quick, practiced motions, tucking her hair underneath the fabric, then slipped the chador robe back over her head so that only her face was exposed. Mark glanced at her as she worked, examining for the first time how she really looked in a chador. It transformed her, accentuating her high cheekbones and large eyes. Beautiful, he thought.

  “Watch the road,” she said.

  “What’s the best way to get to Mashhad?”

  “It’s only an hour or so away but there are always police checkpoints outside cities. Usually they’re just manned by regular cops who inspect your insurance and make sure you’ve got proper license plates, but if word gets out in time, there’ll be military looking for us.”

  “Can we skirt the checkpoints?”

  “Depends on where and how many there are. It’d be a crapshoot.”

  Mark imagined the calls that were being placed right now, alerting police and army troops all over the region. It would take time for everyone to react, though. Some guys would be at home, putting their kids to sleep or drinking contraband liquor in front of the TV. Mobilizations took time.

  He wondered whether they’d been photographed by security cameras at the border. Probably. Which meant that eventually the police at the checkpoints would have photos.

  “What do we need to get through the checkpoints legally?”

  “Valid driver’s licenses, and a car with its papers in order.” Daria opened the dash compartment and inspected the documents inside. “These papers are up to date, but—”

  “—at a minimum we should change cars. The police will be looking for the one we’re driving.”

  “I can hot-wire a Paykan,” said Daria, referring to a popular Iranian-made car that had gone out of production a few years back.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, they’re like lawn mowers.”

  They passed a public park where Iranian families were picnicking on the grass, finishing up late dinners. Mark reflected for a moment on the huge chasm between the grotesque underworld he’d slipped back into and the placid normal world most people lived in, even in Iran. He also figured that stealing decent licenses from those normal, gullible people wouldn’t be a problem. Getting the proper tools to alter them might be, though. “When do the stores close around here?”

  “Probably eleven.”

  “Will they have what we need for the licenses?”

  “Quchan isn’t big, but it’s big enough. There’ll be a mall somewhere.”

  On the bed of a three-dollar-a-night hotel room, under a qiblah arrow that pointed praying Muslims toward Mecca, Daria arranged a pack of razor blades, rubber cement glue, a digital camera, a Lenovo laptop, a photo printer, photo paper, a couple of sheets of clear laminating paper, a scanner, hair dye, tweezers, two pairs of weak reading glasses, a travel iron, and new clothes for herself and Mark.

  Next to all that, Mark placed two standard-class Iranian driver’s licenses. Printed on the faces of the licenses were photos of the licensees—a married couple from Tabriz. The wife was thirty-six years old and the husband was thirty-eight. Mark had stolen their wallets while the couple tended to their crying infant. To soften the blow, he’d left two hundred dollars in Iranian rials in their coat pockets.

  In preparation for their head-shot photos, they retreated to the bathroom. Daria cut Mark’s hair short on the sides, so that his face looked thinner, and he lopped three inches off Daria’s hair, leaving her with a bob cut.

  “God, you stink,” she said, as he cut her hair.

  After she finished with his hair, he wiped away all the cigarette ash beneath his eyes, showered, shaved off his three-day beard, and put on new clothes. Then he cut up pieces of cardboard packaging and wedged them into the heels of his shoes, adding an inch to his height so that he stood nearly as tall as the six feet listed on his new driver’s license.

  Overall it wasn’t much of a disguise, he thought, as he slipped on the weak reading glasses and looked in the small mirror above the toilet, standing a foot behind Daria as she worked on her own appearance. But he looked different enough that your average cop with a photo of him crossing the border earlier in the day would at least have to do a double take. He tried pushing the glasses lower, to mask the distinctive bump he had as a result of his nose being broken by KGB goons nearly two decades ago.

  Daria plucked her eyebrows so that they were thinner and had more of an arch. She wiped away the makeup that had been covering the scars on her face. When she saw him looking at her, she got self-conscious and put her hands up to cover her face.

  “I look like hell, I know.”

  Mark stood a foot behind her.

  He’d actually been thinking that she was still beautiful, despite all she’d been through. She’d probably never see it that way, though.

  He could see someone else’s garbage—old fava beans and a bunch of used tissues—in the waste bin under the sink. The fava beans smelled sour, and a stink of sewage gas seeped up from the base of the toilet.

  Daria didn’t belong in this dump, he thought. No one did.

  “You look fine.”
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  51

  China, Above Xinjiang

  THE BEIJING-BOUND ARMY transport plane was pretty utilitarian inside, but Li Zemin was seated up front, where a few comfortable captain’s chairs had been bolted to the steel floor—a first-class section of sorts, reserved for military and intelligence bigwigs. A young lieutenant general sat beside him.

  Not long into the trip, an air force steward asked Zemin and the lieutenant general if they wanted tea and crackers.

  Zemin said he’d brought his own tea. Just hot water would be fine. He sneezed and rummaged through his shoulder bag for the mix of oolong tea and medicinal herbs that his trusted herbalist in Beijing had prepared for him.

  “Try it with some baijiu,” said the lieutenant general. He produced a green porcelain bottle and offered it to Zemin. “A little bit will help clear your nose.”

  Zemin was about to refuse the offer—baijiu was a notoriously strong liquor that his wife had frowned upon when she’d been alive. And Zemin had never been much of a drinker anyway. But he found himself thinking that baijiu might be just the thing he needed to help him deal with his uncle. So he accepted the bottle, and after steeping his tea in hot water for a few minutes, he poured a few ounces of the alcohol on top.

  The baijiu had been infused with the fragrance of honey, so despite its potency, it slipped down Zemin’s throat with ease. It did nothing to clear his nose, but he announced the success of the treatment to the lieutenant general anyway.

  “Then the bottle is yours,” replied the lieutenant general, as Zemin had known he would.

  “But I couldn’t possibly accept.”

  “I insist.” He explained that the brand was common in his home city of Shanghai, but hard to find in Beijing.

  Zemin offered his thanks for the gift and, an hour later, when he ordered more hot water for tea, he topped off his cup with another healthy pour of the liquor.

  52

  Mashhad, Iran

  MASHHAD AT DAWN was frantic with honking cars, tour buses and construction trucks, and crowds of people streaming along with great purpose. The pollution was so thick in the streets that Mark’s eyes began to water as he walked. It was a city that had grown too fast, he thought, with no central planning.

  In the city center, towering high above the maze of clogged streets and surrounding buildings, loomed an enormous dome tiled in solid gold and topped by a green flag. It was the shrine of Imam Reza, Daria said, one of Shiite Islam’s most revered figures. Tall golden minarets rose on either side of it, and strings of lights suspended from the top of the minarets flared outward like bell-bottoms. A massive Vatican-like city-within-a-city had grown up around the shrine.

  When Mark got to the high tiled walls that separated the shrine complex from the rest of Mashhad, he presented his Iranian driver’s license to one of the guards standing at the men’s entrance. Having already used it at two police checkpoints, when he and Daria had breezed into Mashhad early that morning, he was confident by now that it would be accepted.

  The guard glanced at the license, as though to be polite, swept a hand-held metal detector across Mark’s body, and asked a question in Farsi.

  Mark didn’t understand the question, but guessed the guard was asking him what his intentions were.

  “Pilgrimage, pay my respects to Imam Reza.” Mark spoke in Azeri. More Azeris lived in Iran than in Azerbaijan, and it was a common language of commerce in Iran. He figured in a place so heavily trafficked as this that the guards would understand him.

  “Camera?” asked the guard, this time in Azeri. He patted Mark’s body down, but stayed away from Mark’s genitals, where Mark had hidden a roll of tape and a sheaf of paper fliers. Mark had figured it would be like a football game, where you were allowed to smuggle in as much booze as you could fit next to your balls.

  “No.”

  The guard motioned for him to pass through the gates, and Mark entered the first of a series of interlocking courtyards that surrounded the shrine. In front of him, a woman in a black chador was praying, her eyes cast toward the sky, her hands held up in front of her as though holding an imaginary box. A nearby signpost pointed the way to ancient mosques, museums, religious schools, libraries, tourist centers, guest houses…

  Most of the complex was technically off-limits to non-Muslims, but tests for religious purity were impossible to administer to the millions of visitors who passed through every year.

  He followed the arrow pointing to the shrine itself and soon reached an inner courtyard that was ringed by a two-story arcade clad in millions of hand-painted tiles. Clusters of men in robes knelt on rugs, praying, and a gray cat walked on a roof high above the courtyard. A little girl, too young to need to cover her hair, brushed by him as she chased a little boy. As Mark traversed the courtyard, a flock of green pigeons flew up and settled on top of the gilded water station where pilgrims were washing themselves before entering the shrine to pray.

  The entrance to the shrine stood under a gold-tiled vaulted Persian arch; a giant chandelier hung from its apex. To either side of the entrance were areas where pilgrims could remove their shoes before going inside. Mark approached the men’s section and pulled out his sheaf of fliers.

  On each flier was a photo of the man in the black turban.

  Underneath the photo, it read, in Farsi, Are you learned enough to know the name of this esteemed sayyid, next Friday’s Prayer leader? The first fifty worshippers to call will be rewarded with a private sermon by this learned man, to be held at the Balasar Mosque. There he will enlighten all of the glory of Imam Reza, peace be upon him. At the bottom of the flier was a telephone number and the name Center for Islamic Studies.

  Mark taped three fliers to a wall where people preparing to enter the shrine were sure to see them.

  Next he went to a school, where women in black chadors were seated on a carpeted floor in a central room studying the Qur’an while their children played with humidifiers, putting their hands near the steam and laughing when it touched their hands.

  He taped five fliers to the green bulletin board near the entrance.

  Next came a library, then a huge courtyard where he taped fliers to half the lampposts.

  Outside a mosque, over a thousand people stood in bare feet or socks on prayer carpets, bowing as one. Mark walked among them as though looking for a family member, trying to avoid the men in blue suits wielding rainbow-colored feather dusters who were directing late-arriving worshippers to their proper places. He spotted fourteen black-turbaned sayyids among the crowd. None was the man he was looking for. He taped more fliers to the walls near the mosque entrance on his way out.

  As he did so an old man, dressed in a torn sport coat and wool ski hat, with a face like leather, demanded to know what he was doing.

  Mark flashed him a nasty look. “Contest,” he said in Azeri, and taped up another flier.

  He met Daria outside the main entrance to the shrine complex. She’d spent the morning posting fliers at religious universities and mosques around greater Mashhad. In her pocket was one of two cell phones they’d bought that morning, along with several prepaid SIM cards; the number for the cell phone in her pocket was the number now printed on all the fliers.

  “Three calls already.”

  The first had been from a school administrator who was irate about the fliers that had been plastered all over his campus. The second was from someone pointing out that the prayer leader for next Friday was supposed to be Ayatollah Tabrizi, not the man pictured on the flier. The third was from a student who had mistakenly thought the man pictured was the leader of Iran’s parliament.

  Another call came in twenty minutes later. Daria answered as if she were the receptionist for the fictional Center for Islamic Studies, cupping the mouthpiece with her hand to muffle the street noise.

  After hanging up, she said, “A woman from Ferdowsi University swears our man is a guy named Amir Bayat, owner and editor in chief of the Enqelab. She said she grew up in Tehran and her fath
er worked at the paper for years. She wants to know when she’s getting her pass for the sermon.”

  The Enqelab, Mark knew, was a hard-line conservative newspaper published in Tehran. When he’d been with the CIA, he’d frequently read translated versions of it. He eyed a cop directing traffic and suggested that they find an Internet café and find out everything they could about Amir Bayat.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” said Daria. “We can be in Tehran in seven hours. Once we get there, I know someone who will be able to tell us a lot more about Amir Bayat than we’d ever be able to learn online.”

  53

  Beijing, China

  LI ZEMIN DROVE up to a set of spiked wrought-iron gates in his black Toyota Camry. A private security guard, wearing a uniform that mimicked those worn by the Chinese army, motioned for him to stop.

  Zemin handed over his identification and looked past the gates. With its smattering of red-tiled roofs, stucco buildings, and Spanish street names, the planned community of Santa Barbara was supposed to give the wealthy Beijing residents who lived there the impression that they in fact inhabited the small California coastal town.

  Zemin was not a man of strong passions—mild dislike was usually about all he could muster for even the most disagreeable elements of life—but Santa Barbara was an exception.

  He loathed the place.

  Forty-five years ago, during the Cultural Revolution, having been labeled a capitalist roader by forces loyal to Mao, his father had been executed. A year later, his mother had died of pneumonia in a jail, where she’d been locked up for having supported his father.

  Zemin had been raised by his uncle and taught to despise his dead parents because of their alleged ties to capitalism. Santa Barbara made a mockery of that history.

  Now everyone was a capitalist, and his uncle, the great general, lived like the very capitalists he’d taught Zemin to despise.