The Leveling (37 page)

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.”

Two Days Later

M
ARK AND
D
ECKER
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.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Me too.”

“Hey, I tried to ditch Alty’s iPhone after I sent the e-mail, but I fucked up. It was kind of a tight situation.”

Mark thought about Alty’s brother Nuriyev and all the pain that would result from Alty’s death. “I’ll bet.”

“No hard feelings?” asked Deck.

“We’re good.”

A break in the clouds allowed a few slivers of sunlight to penetrate the dark sky. The light sparkled as it hit the blue water, and then a burst of wind stretched the sail taut, so that the water rushing off the bow bubbled like a fountain.

Mark began to think of all that had happened since leaving Baku, and how little he still knew about what had really been going on. The situation was too fluid, too layered, too complex. There were limits to what one washed-up spy—or for that matter, an old ayatollah or a Chinese Guoanbu chief, or even a supreme leader—could understand. Why kill yourself trying?

He exhaled deeply, and instead began to think again of Daria, and of what Decker had just said about her.

That was another situation that he’d thought was insurmountably complicated. But for a moment he allowed himself to consider the possibility that things had changed.

When he’d first met Daria, she’d been a young, naive idealist. And he’d been a cynical, burned-out spy. But since then, a leveling of sorts had taken place between them. The hunt for Decker had made that clear. So maybe now it was as simple as two people liking each other.

He began to wonder where she had gone, and what she was doing with all that money she’d undoubtedly made, and whether he’d even be able to find her if he tried.

The latter question was the only one he was able to answer with certainty.

Of course he’d be able to find her. It had taken him—what?—three days to find Decker? Finding Daria would be a piece of cake.

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

T
HE OLD WOMAN
shook her head and clucked with disapproval as she drew the long muslin curtains closed. They had been washed the previous month but had already grown dirty again from little hands tugging on them. She’d have to wash them again tomorrow.

Even with the curtains shut tight, the afternoon light filtered into the room, making strange patterns on the worn red carpet. Although the children were supposed to be sleeping, one little boy’s eyes were open, staring at the patterns. The old woman gave him a look, and he quickly turned his head.

The children were all in identical pine toddler beds. One had a harelip, another the short neck and small ears of a Down syndrome child. The rest appeared normal. Because of a lice infestation the week before, the boys and girls alike all had their hair cut tight to their scalps.

The woman enjoyed the stillness for a moment, lulled by the sibilant rhythms of the children breathing. Until she heard the sound of gravel crunching under car wheels, that is.

She froze up, hoping it wasn’t that government inspector from Bishkek who’d come by last month. She walked back to the curtains and pulled one open a few inches.

A black Volga idled in the driveway. The checkerboard symbol on the car marked it as one of the city’s expensive official taxis, and she could see the silhouette of a single passenger in the backseat.
A single passenger
, she thought to herself, shaking her
head with disapproval at the extravagance of it, especially when there was a bus stop just down the road.

But the old woman’s displeasure abated when she saw who stepped out of the taxi. The foreigner had dark hair and carried a briefcase in her right hand. Her green dress stood out next to the bright blue bench at the end of the driveway.

Every year there were new ones, thought the old woman. She didn’t trust the do-gooders. She didn’t believe in their ability to perform miracles. Still, she remembered liking this one more than the rest. Instead of saying what her organization was prepared to give, this foreigner had first asked what was needed.

What was needed? What was needed were parents! Someone to read a story to a child, to make him a favorite meal, to buy him a favorite toy. No one here had anything of his or her own. It wore on the children. Their minds didn’t grow. They were starved for individual love.