The Leveling (25 page)

After twenty minutes of listening to Bates walk him through all the figures, the president rubbed his temples. “What’s the bottom line here?”

Bates pulled out a series of charts, which she explained were regression analyses that took into account the age, religiosity, and social status of the fathers as a predictive measure of whether they would seek revenge.

“The bottom line is this—the older a man is, and the higher his social status, the less likely he is to seek revenge. For someone like Khorasani, you’re talking about less than a one percent chance that he’s going to resort to violence. But even that figure doesn’t tell the real story, because it doesn’t distinguish an eye-for-an-eye kind of revenge from what Khorasani, as the leader of a nation, is theoretically capable of. Most of the revenge killings we studied were rational, from the point of the killer. They redressed a wrong in a way that fit with the perpetrator’s worldview—an eye for an eye. In only two instances was revenge exacted in a way that could be considered irrational—in Turkey when a father went on a monthlong arson spree, killing twenty, and in Bahrain where a father drowned the five young children of his daughter’s rapist. In the case of Khorasani, all the evidence my office has compiled indicates that, despite his willingness to support groups that kill innocents, the intelligence reports we’re receiving would represent a break from his rational model. There’s not enough data to perform a decent analysis on the probability of his breaking with his rational model, but when we just plug in what numbers we have, you’re talking close to nil.”

“Except that the Mossad says it’s going to happen.”

“Except that the Mossad says it’s going to happen,” Bates confirmed. “And I trust their intelligence operation. And the Mossad report has been confirmed by our own sources in the MEK.”

The president rubbed his temples. “Are you saying you lack confidence in the assessment you just gave me?”

“I am, Mr. President. You know the rule—garbage in, garbage out. We did our absolute best to meet your mandate in a time frame that would prove useful to you. But we were assembling data, sometimes incomplete, from a variety of countries,
all of whom treat crime statistics differently. Not to mention the fact that comparing the actions of your regular man on the street with a ruler like Khorasani is sketchy at best. I wouldn’t trust this analysis.”

After Melissa Bates left, the president leaned back in his chair, removed his watch, placed it on his desk, and ran his hand through his thin hair. White stubble covered his chin.

“I want every intelligence agency working overtime, vacuuming up every scrap of information they can about what the Iranians are up to,” he said to his chief of staff. “Open wallets, crack heads. Anything you get comes straight to me ASAP.”

“Wallets are already open. Heads are already being cracked.”

“I’d feel a lot better if we had
some
kind of confirmation, from a source outside the Mossad and MEK, that we’re not being jerked around and acting on bad intel.”

Turkmenistan, Near the Border with Iran

M
ARK MET
M
URAT
at a roadside truck stop on the outskirts of Ashgabat. The dirt parking lot was littered with little straws and burned metal wires, evidence of truckers dosing themselves with opium before venturing across the bleak Kara-Kum Desert.

“Chadors for the religious ladies!” Murat, slouching, pointed to the dusty rolls of black fabric that filled most of the Russian 18-wheeler. The truck trailer’s canvas sides had been ratcheted down, but sand and road filth had swirled in through the gaps. “The chadors protect the vodka we hide inside them!” Murat seemed to think that was funny. “Call when you make it through.” He took a cheap cell phone out of his front pocket. “This will work in Iran and even at the border you will have good antenna. When you cross, give the soldiers this.” He handed over an Iranian passport that had been stamped with an expired visa. “Tell them you went to Ashgabat to gamble and are now paying the truck driver a fee to take you back to Iran. The soldiers on both sides of the border will accept the visa. Everything has been arranged.”

“And if they don’t?”

“They will not be paid. Which is why the documentation is always accepted. Where is the woman?”

“She’ll be going alone.” Daria, it turned out, had a perfectly valid Iranian passport—one that she’d neglected to surrender after leaving the Agency. So she was just going to drive across the border.

Murat eyed him. “No refund. Our agreement was for two.”

“I didn’t ask for a refund.”

Mark climbed into the cab of the truck. A Russian driver wearing a soiled dress shirt and a red bandana on his head acknowledged him with a surly nod.

The air grew cooler as they drove up toward the mountain pass that led into Iran. Soon they cleared a gated army checkpoint that marked the beginning of the restricted border zone. The Kopet Dag Mountains here were gently sloping, covered with occasional patches of green spring grass, and broken up by shallow canyons. It was six thirty in the evening. The sun hung low in the sky, and the shadows were long.

Eventually the road leveled out and the truck’s air brakes hissed as it ground to a stop. They’d reached the border. Mark counted six trucks and two cars ahead of them.

The truck at the front of the line was being inspected by Turkmen soldiers dressed in camouflage uniforms and floppy safari hats. Beyond it, Mark could see a squat white-marble building and a ten-foot-tall wrought-iron border fence.

A minute later, Daria pulled up behind them in the Niva. She wore a black headscarf and was smoking. Two more trucks pulled up behind her. Turkmen soldiers with automatic rifles paced back and forth at the very end of the line.

When the lead truck was cleared to pass, the whole line moved forward. Mark wasn’t surprised when he saw the soldier who’d been guarding the Chinese embassy earlier in the day. He wore civilian clothes and stood next to an older Chinese; both men stood off to the side, eyeing the incoming vehicles as the Turkmen soldiers searched them.

Mark turned to the driver. Speaking Russian, he said, “Murat told you of the special problems we’re likely to encounter?”

“Calm yourself.” The driver spoke like a man who was used to dealing with panicked novices. But after a minute of silence, he asked, “What special problems?”

Mark explained that he’d been involved in the shooting in downtown Ashgabat earlier in the day and that it was entirely possible that people at the border would be looking for him, people who almost certainly wouldn’t be bound by any smuggling agreement arrived at between Murat and the border soldiers.

The driver protested that Murat had said nothing of this, nothing at all! And that Mark should have said something earlier! Now that they were in line, they couldn’t turn around without triggering a search.

Mark claimed that he
had
told Murat about the situation, which was a lie, and that he wished he’d said something sooner, which was another lie—in fact, he’d purposely waited to tell the Russian what was really going on until it was too late to turn around.

A minute later, the line moved forward again. The Turkmen soldiers descended on a new truck. They checked under the hood, inside and under the cab, and through everything being transported in the trailer.

The driver eyed the Chinese observers then banged his hands on the steering wheel. “Murat told me nothing of this.”

“Listen, buddy. This is what we’re going to have to do…”

Mark explained his plan. The driver twisted in his seat to face Mark and clenched his teeth. “Don’t touch me. And keep your clothes on,
pedik
.”

Mark gestured to the Chinese. “Do you have any better ideas?”

The driver didn’t.

The driver threw his truck into neutral and let it slowly roll back down the hill. When Mark heard the crunch of the truck’s rear
bumper ramming into Daria’s front bumper, he slipped out of the cab wearing the Russian driver’s old shirt, pants, plastic sandals, and red-bandana head covering.

Daria climbed out of her car.

“We’ve switched to plan B.” Mark glanced at her dented bumper.

“Yeah, I saw them.”

Mark made eye contact with the trucker directly behind Daria’s car and drew a finger across his throat.
Mind your own business and keep your mouth shut.
The trucker turned away just as the Russian driver joined them, wearing Mark’s clothes, and began to argue with Mark about the accident. Soon one of the Turkmen soldiers from the end of the line showed up and said to take it up on the other side of the border if they needed to. The line was moving.

Fine, said Mark.

Daria climbed up into the back of the truck, where she took a seat on one of the rolls of black chadors—a religious Iranian woman would never scandalize herself by riding with an unfamiliar man in the cab.

The Russian climbed into Daria’s car, while Mark took his place behind the steering wheel of the 18-wheeler. The seat was frayed, and hard springs poked into his back. He twisted the key in the ignition, shifted into first, gently raised the clutch, and stalled out. The second time he got it and pulled up to where he should have been in line. Then he studied his new passport.

Given the grisly nature of her suicide, Mark had become adept at blocking out most memories of his mother. But he thought of her now because she’d immigrated to the United States from the Soviet state of Georgia as a girl. Her father had been a Russian, and Mark had inherited some of his grandfather’s Russian features—the slightly droopy eyelids, the light skin, the brown eyes. Enough so that he thought he looked at least a bit like the Russian driver, whose passport he now held in his hand.
They were also roughly the same height and age. It wouldn’t hurt that the photo itself was creased and dirty.

The Russian driver’s eyes were even deeper set than his own, though. With dark circles under them.

Mark wet his finger, dipped it into the coffee-can ashtray on the floor, and rubbed in some ash under each eye. Then he smeared ash on his teeth near where they met the gums.

He glanced at the passport photo again. The Russian’s hair was brown and Mark had dyed his black, so he tried to push more of his hair under the bandana he now wore on his head.

Hanging from the rearview mirror was a set of well-worn worry beads. He took them down and placed them in his pocket. A half-empty pack of Java cigarettes, a Russian brand, lay on the dashboard. He pocketed those too.