The Leveling

by Dan Mayland

  Daria stood in front of the cabin and looked out toward the bright horizon on the sea. The waves lapped gently on the beach. It was a pretty but deceptive picture, she knew. The Caspian was a dumping ground for all of Central Asia. Filth from the Volga, oil spillage from the international rigs, sewage from all over…

  Decker lay on a bed inside the cabin. She and Mark had cleaned and tried to disinfect the wounds on his leg, made him drink a liter of juice and eat some rice, and then given him lots of painkillers and several amoxicillin pills, an antibiotic that Daria had bought over the counter at a pharmacy.

  Daria looked around for Mark and eventually noticed him sitting in the shadow of a nearby tree, where the scrub grass ended and the beach began. They’d checked in as a married couple from Turkey, on their way back from a pilgrimage to Mashhad, and had smuggled Decker into the cabin after the woman who ran the place had gone back to the office.

  Daria strolled up to Mark, sat down next to him, and dipped the tips of her shoes into the gray sand. Their shoulders touched.

  “Hey,” she said, pretending not to be nervous. She’d been doing a lot of thinking on the drive down from the mountains, and she’d come to the conclusion that she needed to leave—the sooner the better. There were two reasons for that, neither of which she wanted to share with Mark.

  “Hey.”

  Daria waited for Mark to say more. When he didn’t, she said, “Listen, I’m thinking the intel Deck collected should be seen by Washington soon. All that talk of Natanz and Fordo…”

  “Yeah. But we can’t send the files from here.”

  Daria had figured Mark would say that. The Iranian government monitored Internet traffic and overseas telephone calls. It was too risky to try to transfer the information while they were still in Iran.

  Mark added, “And we can’t move Deck yet. In a day or two, maybe.”

  “Yeah, but I can be at the Azeri border in a couple hours. And I can cross it no problem with my Iranian passport.”

  Mark appeared to consider her proposition for a moment. “And I stay here with Deck?”

  “You don’t need me for the extraction.” They’d talked about what he planned to do. He’d be fine without her. “And we should copy and split the files anyway, in case one of us gets caught.”

  Even though what she was saying made perfect sense, Daria knew she was being manipulative, which made her feel guilty.

  Mark wiggled his bare toes in the sand. “OK. Just promise me you’ll contact the Agency as soon as you cross.” Without waiting for her to answer, he said he’d give her the number of Ted Kaufman, his former boss and the chief of the Agency’s Central Eurasia Division, along with a letter code that would allow her to bypass the usual security barriers so that she’d be able to speak to him directly. “Give him a summary of what we found out and then send him the final voice recording ASAP. The photo files might take longer to transfer, but—what’s wrong?”

  Daria had let her head dip. She really didn’t want to deceive Mark. Not after all they’d been through. But she worried that he was dead set on just giving the intel to his old buddies at Langley. For free. He talked a big game about being sick of the CIA and all, and making money off of people like Holtz, but she knew him better than that.

  “Nothing. I’ll call Kaufman.”

  “But?”

  Daria chewed her lower lip, then looked at him and said, “But I told you back in Almaty I was trying to get intel on the Chinese. For the purpose of selling it.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I told you, Mark. I told you that’s what I was doing.”

  That was reason one why she needed to leave now—so that she could sell the intel before Mark gave it away.

  “I thought we were helping Decker.”

  “We were. But now…”

  “Hey, if you’re pissed at the Agency, then pass the intel to someone at State. I don’t have great contacts with State, though.”

  “There’s been a serious fracture in the Iranian leadership. Ayatollah Bayat, the head of the Guardian Council, was plotting behind Supreme Leader Khorasani’s back and taking money from the Chinese. And now we think the Chinese might have killed Ayatollah Bayat. And the Bayat brothers were talking about moving stuff from known nuclear sites. How many billions does the US spend each year on intelligence? The intel we collected is worth a lot of money.”

  Mark just shook his head.

  Daria didn’t want things to end badly. She turned toward him, almost touching his cheek with her hand before pulling back. “Listen, I’ve got a project going on. Something I care a lot about. But I need to fund it. That’s why I was spying on the Chinese in the first place.”

  “What project?”

  “I…” Daria didn’t want to tell him; she was afraid he might try to talk her out of what she was doing, and she didn’t want to be talked out of it.

  “I, what?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  Mark sighed. “Well, how much funding are we talking about?”

  “A lot. As much as I can get.” She thought about offering him a cut, but didn’t think he’d respond well.

  “Well, fuck it. I guess I don’t care if you sell the intel. But I can tell you that under a million Kaufman can authorize immediately. More than that and you’re talking about an approval process that could take days. And as soon as I get out I’ll give it to him for free because something tells me there’s a lot more going on than either of us know. So you’re not going to have long to bargain.”

  Daria shrugged, but she was smiling inside.

  Mark said, “Also, Washington is going to demand exclusivity.”

  “I’ll offer exclusivity. But I won’t honor it.”

  “Oh, that’s a great plan.”

  He sounded more resigned than angry, she thought.

  “I didn’t think you’d like it. But it’s the Great Game, remember? People have been killing each other over here for centuries. It doesn’t really matter what either of us does. Since we can’t shut it down, we might as well make some money off it.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you talking.”

  Daria said, “It’s not. Those are your words from eight months ago.”

  “I don’t remember saying that.”

  “Well, I added the part about money. The rest was you.”

  “Huh. Who knew?”

  They sat looking at the sea for a while. She enjoyed talking to Mark, and just being next to him. It reminded her of when they’d been together in Baku.

  Stop it.

  She had a sudden urge to ask him what he planned on doing with his life now that he’d been thrown out of Azerbaijan and had lost his job and his book. And whether she could help him, the way he had once helped her. To be there for him, in his hour of need.

  Don’t do this to yourself. He doesn’t need, or want, your help. Because he doesn’t—

  Don’t think it.

  Because he doesn’t love you.

  That’s what it came down to. The best thing she could do for Mark was to let him be. She’d realized that when they last parted. And she’d accepted it. But being together again…

  She had to get out of here, she thought. Now. Before she made a fool out of herself.

  “I should be going.” She stood up.

  “What…now?

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t we get something to eat first, talk about—”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Mark looked a little puzzled. “Hey, hold on. After you get to the border—”

  “I’ll call Kaufman.”

  Daria started walking away.

  “Yeah, but how will I know you made it?”

  She refused to turn back to look at him because she knew what her face would reveal. “When you talk to Kaufman on the other side,” she called over her shoulder.

  “How will you know that I made it?”

  “Oh, you’ll make it,” said Daria. Of that she had no doubt.

>   68

  Washington, DC

  THE PRESIDENT SAT behind his desk in the Oval Office, listening to an audio file that had cost the US government $990,000—wired to an account in the Seychelles—to obtain. Seated before him, in wingback chairs, were the director of national intelligence, the secretary of defense, and Melissa Bates, the head of the CIA’s Persia House. As the tape played, Bates translated the Farsi to English.

  It was one o’clock in the afternoon. The attack was scheduled to start within the hour. The file they were listening to had been e-mailed to the CIA a half hour earlier.

  Khorasani suspects something.

  Why do you say this?

  The intelligence ministry is investigating Hashemi.

  Melissa Bates hit Pause and said, “Hashemi is a top general in the Revolutionary Guard. He controls security for the nuclear facility at Natanz, and the Mossad has had a plant in his office for over a year now.” She started the tape again.

  For what?

  He purchased a new car. A Peugeot 405, and he paid in cash.

  The fool.

  He was told to wait to use the payments.

  This is the problem with involving men like Hashemi.

  But I had no choice. He was my only link to the Damascus katsa.

  Bates said, “Here it gets complicated—a katsa is a Mossad operations officer, an Israeli spy. The one man the Mossad has in Damascus is legendary. He’s been operating undercover for over ten years there and was also the point man for collecting Israeli intelligence coming out of Iran, including intelligence that was coming out of Hashemi’s office. Bottom line, this appears to be evidence that the Iranians knew about the spy in Hashemi’s office and were using her to feed intelligence to the Mossad’s point man in Damascus.”

  “Did the intel about Khorasani’s daughter and the Hezbollah connection come out of Hashemi’s office?” asked the president.

  “It did.”

  “So the Iranians were playing us. They uncovered the Mossad’s spy in Hashemi’s office, and rather than expose her they used her to feed us whatever intelligence they wanted.”

  Instead of answering, Melissa Bates started the recorder up again.

  Can the payments be traced to you?

  I never communicated with him directly.

  Shirazi—

  “Deputy minister of intelligence,” interjected Melissa Bates. “And a top hard-liner.”

  —can stall the investigation until the Americans act.

  I received word that matériel was moved from Natanz and Fordo yesterday. And I confirmed that Khorasani’s daughter will remain hidden until she completes her religious studies. It will not matter how many spies the Americans and the Israelis send to Kish. They will learn nothing.

  Khorasani will be in your debt.

  Yes, but he must never—

  The tape clicked off.

  “We’ve long thought that Ayatollah Muhammad Bayat was the intellectual leader of the hard-line conservatives in Iran, and that he would welcome a confrontation with us,” said Melissa Bates. “If you listen closely to his sermons and read through the lines on some NSA intercepts, it’s not hard to conclude that he thinks Iran needs better external enemies so that Iran’s internal enemies can be silenced without fear of sparking a revolution. And he’s well aware of the fact that nuclear power is pretty popular with all Iranians, even those who hate the regime. My guess is that he was hoping that an attack on the nuclear program would rally people around the flag and breathe new life into the regime.”

  “So he set about finding a way to provoke us,” said the president.

  “What I think we’re learning right now is that Ayatollah Bayat and the Chinese teamed up to feed us false intelligence about Khorasani’s daughter being raped by the Israelis, and about Khorasani taking his revenge by giving a nuclear weapon to Hezbollah. And that Khorasani himself is clueless about it all.”

  “You trust the source of these tapes?” asked the president.

  “Not entirely,” said Bates. “They come from a woman who left the Agency eight months ago, and it wasn’t an amicable parting. But she claims, and we can confirm, that she’s been working with one of our former station chiefs, a guy named Mark Sava—and we do trust him. Three days ago he survived an assassination attempt in Baku, so the two of them are knee-deep in something.”

  “You’ve spoken with Sava about the intel?”

  “No. We haven’t been able to contact him. Our understanding is that he’s still in Iran. Apparently he gave her classified contact information for our Central Eurasian division chief, which is why we were able to get the intel so quickly. The other thing we can confirm is that one of the voices you just heard on that tape is without a doubt Ayatollah Bayat himself. He frequently delivers the Friday prayer service at Tehran University, so we know his voice. It’s a perfect match.”

  The president considered the matter, but only for a moment. “Get me CENTCOM and the Israelis on the phone. We’ll stand down. For now.”

  69

  Two Days Later

  MARK AND DECKER sailed out in the late afternoon from an Iranian fishing town not far from the Azeri border. The boat was only a few meters long, with a single sail. A strong south wind was blowing.

  Plenty of other boats were out on the water, eager to catch what fish they could before the predicted rain really started coming down. Most of them were motorized, though, especially the ones that ventured far out into the sea. At ten miles out, Mark’s sail was an anomaly. But everyone would just think he was a crazy caviar poacher, he knew, driven by greed to take risks. And nobody bothered the poachers.

  The wind had only started up in earnest a few hours earlier, not long enough to really whip the waves up into a frenzy, and they made good progress gliding over the relatively calm waters. Mark was at the stern, with the tiller in one hand and the mainsheet in the other. Decker sat on a damp cushion a few feet in front of him, wearing a baseball cap and a white dress shirt. He’d rolled the sleeves up on the shirt because it was several sizes too small for him.

  When the land behind them disappeared from view, Mark changed his tack so that now they were sailing almost on a full run, doing six or seven knots, he estimated. With the wind at their back, everything became quiet except for the creak of the wooden mast as the boat yawed back and forth. The gray sail, stained over the years by spatters of grease and fish guts, appeared as one with the dark sky.

  “Stop for dinner in Lenkoran?” said Decker.

  Mark was still amazed at Decker’s powers of recuperation. He was like one of those gag birthday candles whose flame kept relighting itself, no matter how many times you blew it out. The morning after Daria left, Mark had woken up to find Decker wrapping his ankle with long strips of ripped bedsheets. All the food in the cabin had been eaten. Decker had taken more antibiotics and painkillers on his own and had changed the dressing on his gunshot leg. After sleeping for another day, he’d been ready to move.

  Mark knew that, to some extent, Decker had to be faking it—no one could bounce back that fast from that kind of abuse. But the fact that he was able to fake it at all was impressive.

  “So is that a yes?” asked Decker. “Because I could use some food.”

  “No.” Mark had called Orkhan just before setting sail and then throwing away his cell phone. In exchange for immediate safe passage from the coast to the US embassy in Baku, he’d agreed to give the Azeris a copy of Decker’s surveillance files. And to continue Heydar’s SAT tutoring via videoconference. For free. Mark had also tried to get his persona non grata status lifted as part of the exchange, but Orkhan had refused. After one day at the embassy, he’d need to leave again. “The Azeris are going to pick us up at sea before we get there.” Mark pointed to a boat on the horizon that looked a little bigger than the rest. “I’m hoping that’s our ride there.”

  “No kidding?” said Decker.

  “No kidding.”

  “You’re full of secrets, huh?” Decker let
one of his swollen hands drag in the cool water and pretended not to wince as he adjusted his wounded leg. He was looking out toward the bow of the boat. After a couple of minutes, he said, “So you probably heard I had a thing for Daria.”

  “Oh?”

  “She didn’t tell you?”

  Mark didn’t feel like talking about it, so he lied. “No.”

  “We went to dinner a couple times in Ashgabat.”

  “Sounds fun.”

  “Thing is, every time, we’d wind up talking about you. About your surveillance techniques, your recruitment techniques, your damn book, your tomato plants, I mean, I’m not kidding—we’d go to dinner and they’d serve something with tomatoes in it and before long we’re talking about your damn tomatoes—”

  “The tomatoes are gone. Everything in Baku is gone.”

  Decker continued as though he hadn’t heard Mark, “You know how my mom and dad met?” Without waiting for an answer, he said, “Through AA. They’d both already been through the twelve-step program, the whole works. So before they even started dating, they understood each other in a way other people couldn’t.”

  Mark could guess where Decker was going with that. “Come on, Deck. Give it a rest.”

  “I’m just saying. You and Daria are the only two people I know who could spend so much time together and never really talk. You guys are wired to protect secrets. About yourselves, about other people, about everything. It comes naturally to you. Anyone outside the CIA would think you’re freaks, but you two, if you ever did talk, might really understand each other. Just something to think about. So what happened to your tomato plants?”

  Mark hadn’t told Decker about the extent of the destruction. Mainly because he hadn’t wanted Decker to feel bad about having initiated it.

  “The e-mail you sent me was intercepted. So your Chinese Guoanbu buddies in Ashgabat arranged for someone to kill me. My place got completely trashed and I got tossed out of Azerbaijan. It was a disaster. I lost my job, my book, and my home all in the span of a few hours.”