The Leveling (18 page)

D
ECKER COULD HEAR
his captors frantically searching for him, but the ravine was a large area to cover, and Decker had been trained to be patient and use natural cover to his advantage.

When he’d slowly picked his way far enough through the junipers that he could see the twisting mountain road at the end of the driveway, he took out the pruning shears and tried to loosen the nut and bolt that held the blades together. His fingers trembled and were so weak that he gave up and used his teeth, chipping one of his rear molars in the process. When he finally got the blades separated, a stiff wire spring fell to the ground. He straightened the spring and used it to pick the lock on his handcuffs. He spread juniper needles over the discarded cuffs and stuck the two loose blades in his pocket.

By methodically threading his way through the trees, lying flat on the ground and covering himself with dead branches whenever one of the guards came near, he eventually half-crawled, half-limped to within a hundred yards of the mountain road. He took his time, remaining perfectly still for minutes on end and willing himself not to pass out. The longer they searched, he knew, the wider the search perimeter would need to become. Time was his friend if he could force his body to keep going.

Eventually, one of his captors sped off in a car.

Decker edged forward on his belly until he was within fifty feet of the road. The driveway intersected the road maybe a quarter mile below him. He tried to shake the dirt out of his hair
and wipe his face clean, but all the cuts and bruises made it a painful process. There was no way he was going to look anything approaching normal anyway, so he gave up and started crawling up and away from the driveway, paralleling the road as he did so. He was able to advance maybe a quarter mile more, until the terrain became too steep and the road ducked into a small canyon. To continue forward would mean he’d have to come closer to the road, potentially exposing his position.

He lay there, perfectly still, for an hour—listening to the traffic pass. Early on, one car sped up the hill as if in pursuit of something, but after that, all appeared to be normal.

It was his extreme thirst that finally led him to inch closer to the road.

When he caught a glimpse of a white van slowly winding its way up a section of road below him, he checked for guards. None were visible, so he crawled the rest of the way to the pavement, stood next to a rock that concealed his bare feet, and stuck out his thumb. It was a wild, but calculated, risk. He was barely able to maintain consciousness, he couldn’t stay hidden in the trees forever, and on foot he would be too weak to put any real distance between himself and his captors.

He faced uphill, so that the driver of the van wouldn’t be able to see him, and tried to stand in a way that didn’t draw attention to his injured left leg. The van slowed down, but only so that the driver could honk his horn at Decker and curse him.

The sound of the horn cutting through the silence of a peaceful sunny day was jarring. His captors must have heard it as far back as the house.

Another car appeared. Decker stuck out his thumb again. This time the driver just slowed down and gave him a nasty look. A man in a car going down the hill took one look at Decker’s face and turned away.

But then a black sedan that was slowly laboring up the hill, its tailpipe smoking a bit as it burned oil, pulled over to the side of the road a few yards ahead of Decker. Two pairs of skis had
been affixed to a roof rack. Decker dipped his head down, trying to hide his face as he approached the car. The rear door opened.

“Where do you go, my friend?”

The question was in English. They must have known, just from looking at him, that he was a foreigner. He collapsed in the backseat.

“
Merci
,” he said. His voice came out as a low croak. He kept his head down, eyes pointed to the floor of the car. He thought that if he could just get to the Caspian, he could steal a boat. Water was his ally. “The coast,” he said.

“We can take you part of the way, we go skiing at Dizin—look at me, please.”

Decker raised his head up a fraction of an inch and made eye contact with the driver.

“
A’udhu billah!
”
I seek refuge with God.

“I was robbed. Drive. Please.”

The driver frowned deeply. As though he’d just realized that he may have picked up a complete psychopath.

When the car didn’t move, Decker said, “Drive! Please!”

The driver slowly pulled away. Through the rear windshield Decker saw one of his captors—a man with a short-cropped beard—running after them.

Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

“I
AM THE
political liaison to the American ambassador!” yelled William Thompson.

Mark’s vision was blurry. He put a hand on the back of his head because it felt as if he were bleeding there, but everything was dry—just a bruise, he concluded, filling with blood from the inside.

The Chinese hadn’t killed him in the square. Which meant that now, despite the attempt on his life in Baku, they must want to talk to him. They’d probably want to kill him afterward, but for the moment they wanted him alive. That bit of knowledge was a tactical advantage.

“I am a diplomat, do you hear me?” said Thompson. “And I know damn well you all work for the Guoanbu. I know this! My government will soon know this. Are you trying to start a goddamn war?”

“Quiet!”

Mark and Thompson had been stuffed into the backseat of the gray BMW, squeezed together by a Chinese who sat on their right, clutching a gun. The Chinese in the front passenger seat was also pointing a gun at Mark and Thompson. The driver made a sharp turn, and the car’s tires squealed. Mark felt for his wallet. It was gone. So were his cell phone and passport.

Thompson turned to Mark. “Why is this happening, Sava!”

The car made another sharp turn. They had left the showy white-marble part of the city and entered a neighborhood lined
with old mustard-colored Soviet apartment buildings festooned with a riot of satellite dishes and air conditioners and rotting wood shutters.

“Quiet!” said the Guoanbu agent in the passenger seat of the car.

“I don’t know.” Mark wished everyone would stop yelling.

After speeding through the glum Soviet part of town, they came to a warren of dirt lanes framed by small houses with ramshackle fences protecting little gardens. A couple of minutes later, they skidded to a stop next to an old Russian Lada with bald tires. Everyone climbed out of the BMW and into the Lada.

They took off again, this time more slowly, in the direction of the vast Kara-Kum Desert that began just beyond city the limits. It occurred to Mark that the dunes of the Kara-Kum would be a convenient place to dispose of bodies.

But then they circled back toward downtown Ashgabat. Soon Mark saw the white marble and blue-tinted glass of the President Hotel looming in the distance.

It was Thompson who finally said, “They’re taking us to the Chinese embassy. You will all regret this.”

The Chinese sitting next to Thompson in the backseat smashed the butt of his gun into Thompson’s temple, knocking the station chief’s glasses off his face and opening an inch-long gash that started to bleed.

“Quiet.”

They passed the enormous white-marble embassy of the United Arab Emirates. In the distance, a soldier in an olive-green uniform stood in front of a tall fence. A large red-and-yellow Chinese flag hung from a tall flagpole behind him.

The Chinese in the driver’s seat pulled out an identification badge, as though getting ready to show it to the embassy guard.

Mark figured it was a near certainty that if they drove through those gates, he and Thompson weren’t ever getting out. You don’t abduct and rough up a US station chief and then let
him live to tell Washington who did it. After the interrogation, that would be it. He glanced at the Chinese with the exposed gun in the front passenger seat.

The Chinese stared back at Mark and slowly shook his head, as if to say
don’t even think about it
.

The entrance gate to the Chinese embassy was less than a hundred feet away.

Mark visualized manually unlocking the car door he was pushed up against and rolling out onto the road. They wanted him alive to interrogate him? Well, he’d run and dare them to shoot him. Alone, without Thompson dragging him down, it’d be a footrace, and he’d have a head start.

The car slowed to make the turn into the embassy. Mark was about to go for the lock when out of the corner of his eye he saw a police car on the opposite side of the road careen up onto the grassy median. The police car bounced over the curb, swerved sharply, and then lurched into their lane, going against traffic.

The Chinese driving the Lada cried out and yanked the steering wheel to the right, but the momentum of the two cars speeding toward each other was too much to overcome.

Mark put his arms out and braced himself against the rear of the front seat.

D
ECKER EYED THE
couple who’d picked him up. Both early twenties, he figured. The driver wore sunglasses and a tight red ski sweater. He’d combed his longish jet-black hair straight back, exposing a high forehead. The young woman wore makeup and had plucked her eyebrows. Her green headscarf had slipped down to her shoulders, revealing long brown hair that framed a pretty face.

It pained Decker when she looked at him with such horror.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He glanced out the rear windshield. They’d left the guard who’d been running after them behind. But that guard would have sounded the alarm.

“Where do you come from?” The driver spoke in heavily accented English. A tape cassette of a woman singing a plaintive song in Farsi played on the stereo.

“Canada.”

“I never go to Canada.”

“I was robbed.” It was hard for Decker to speak. All his words came out so raspy that he didn’t even recognize his own voice. “I was hitchhiking and they beat me and robbed me.”

“Maybe because you show the thumb. Here, that is like, how do you say? F-U-C-K you. Some of the people in the mountains are not so smart, maybe they think you insult them. For hitchhiking you must wave the hand. I hitchhiked once in California. You need a doctor.”

“No.” Decker shook his head. “No doctor. I’m OK.”

After an uncomfortable silence, the driver said, “Maybe the police can find these people who beat you. We will take you to the police.”

Decker looked out the rear window. They passed a roadside kebab restaurant. A few modest houses lined the steep banks on either side of the road. He wished the guy would drive faster, but when he looked he saw the gas pedal was already pushed to the floor. At the next cluster of houses he’d have them stop, he thought. Maybe he could steal a car. He thought of trying to steal the car he was in, but didn’t feel up to overpowering its current occupants.

“No. No police. Do you have anything to drink?”

The driver lifted up a ski jacket from the space on the front seat between him and the woman, revealing a six-pack of Coke. The woman handed Decker one, but when he tried to open it, his swollen fingers couldn’t do it. The woman’s eyes widened when she saw Decker’s mutilated hands. Decker looked back right at her, thinking,
let it go
.

He handed her the Coke. “Could you open this for me?”

His voice trembled. She popped the can open and handed it back to him. He tried to take a big gulp, but the liquid was cold. His throat convulsed and he spit it up into his hands.

He felt like an alien.

“I’ll go soon.” He looked out the rear window again. A street sign said
Fasten your seat belt
in English. Between the Coke and the sign in English, Decker wondered whether he was going crazy.

“Doctor,” said the girlfriend.

“No.” Decker took another sip of the Coke, and this time the liquid went down, so he took another sip, and then another until he’d finished the can.

The girlfriend opened another and handed it to him. Decker finished that one too. The car came to a long ridge, and Decker turned to look behind him. He could see the better part of a mile
or so of the road they’d just climbed. Two lanes wide, it wound down through the steep brown hills. An electric power line, with gray metal towers spaced every few hundred feet, paralleled the road.