The Leveling (23 page)

“Sounds like he was the life of the party,” said Mark, wondering how much of the Decker party-guy routine was a just calculated act—a way for Decker to quickly learn far more about what was going on in Ashgabat than he could hanging around with fusty State Department diplomats—and how much of it was just that Decker liked a good time. Fifty-fifty, Mark guessed.

“Yes, of course, all the time.”

The bartender started washing glasses in his utility sink.

“By any chance was he friends with one of the bartenders here?” Mark wrote
[email protected]
on a bar napkin. “Or someone who used this e-mail address.”

The bartender frowned and stopped washing. “Alty was another bartender here.”

“Was?”

“He quit around the same time I last saw the Decker.”

“Quit?”

“He didn’t show up for work.”

“Do you have any idea where he is now?” said Mark.

“No.”

“Know anyone that might?”

The Walk of Health, as it was called, was a wide concrete path that wound for over twenty miles through the desolate hills just
south of Ashgabat. It had been built at great expense to promote exercise, but except for the one day each year when all government employees were required to hike the thing from beginning to end, no one actually used it. Which is why Mark had wanted to meet there, so that he could be sure that Alty’s brother—a man named Atamyrat Nuriyev—had come alone.

They converged on the path about a mile south of the Eternally Great Park, where the path started. Mark approached from the north—after hiking cross-country to reach the path; Nuriyev from the southern park entrance.

Before speaking, Mark studied Nuriyev.

The drooping shoulders and hangdog look suggested that Nuriyev had no news or bad news regarding his missing younger brother; the cheap domestic suit told him that Nuriyev’s government job—assistant to the minister of culture—hadn’t translated into any real power for him; the plastic digital wristwatch he wore, which he’d probably bought for a dollar at the Tolkuchka Bazaar, confirmed this; the broad flat face and almond-shaped eyes told him that Nuriyev was a native Turkmen and not a Russian transplant, which in turn suggested that Nuriyev had grown up dirt-poor during the long Soviet occupation.

Still, Nuriyev was of average height, so he likely hadn’t grown up so poor that his growth had been stunted as a child. His relatively clear complexion suggested that he didn’t smoke and hadn’t adopted the Russian predilection for extreme drinking. And the fact that he hadn’t bought a fake Rolex wristwatch for two dollars, also on sale at the Tolkuchka Bazaar and popular with many Turkmen, suggested a personal modesty.

It was the watch that made Mark decide he would try being honest with Nuriyev. “Thank you for coming so quickly.” Mark spoke the greeting in Turkmen, with what he knew was a heavy Azeri accent.

Nuriyev had removed his government-gray suit jacket, revealing sweat stains underneath his armpits. His pressed suit
pants were an inch too long and the cuffs grazed the ground. Mark was sweating too. He’d climbed three miles to get to their meeting spot, much of it up steep slopes. By now it was three in the afternoon, and the sun was intense. Nuriyev had come straight from work.

Far below them, Ashgabat, hazy and bright, rose out of the desert. A couple of helicopters circled over the city center; evidence, Mark thought, of a security crackdown following the shooting of the Turkmen soldier.

Nuriyev acknowledged Mark with a nod, but didn’t speak. Mark wasn’t surprised. Even in normal situations, most Turkmen were usually so reserved that they made their former Russian overlords look positively friendly—no easy task.

Mark kept both his hands in front of him and in sight so as not to give Nuriyev cause to worry.

After he’d rested a moment, Mark launched into an explanation about Decker, how the cryptic e-mail he’d received had contained the name Alty in it, and how he’d wound up at the British Pub. At the bazaar he’d needed to speak slowly for the merchants to understand him, so he took care to speak slowly now. Eventually, he took out Daria’s phone and clicked open the first of the three photos that had been sent by Alty8. Nuriyev studied it for a moment, but it was as though he were staring through the photo, not really seeing it. Mark clicked on the next one, then the next. “Do these mean anything to you?”

Instead of answering, Nuriyev said, “Alty is my youngest brother.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“He’s only eighteen years old. My family has not heard from him in four days.”

“I see.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“Then explain it to me.”

For the first time, Nuriyev looked Mark right in the eye. “Your colleague shouldn’t have used my brother.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know these things. Your colleague, he’s a CIA spy.”

“No he isn’t.”

“I’m not stupid.”

Mark turned back toward Ashgabat and spent the next half hour explaining everything he knew about why Decker had been in Turkmenistan—the counterfeit money, the rivalry between the United States and China and Russia, CAIN’s role, how Decker and Alty had wound up working together…he didn’t hold back a thing.

At one point Nuriyev put his hand up, as if to say
stop, you are telling me that which I should not be allowed to hear
. But Mark kept talking. He figured he had nothing to lose. The secrets he was divulging weren’t ones he’d been charged with keeping.

He finished by telling Nuriyev that he, Mark, used to work for the CIA but no longer did. And that anyway, the CIA wasn’t the all-powerful force that Nuriyev seemed to think it was.

“Even if your colleague wasn’t working for the CIA, he used my brother in an investigation that was paid for by the US government. My brother is eighteen years old. He should not have been involved. Your government used him. This John Decker used him.”

Nuriyev spoke emphatically, but with his sweaty shirt and rumpled hair, he looked unsure of himself. A hot breeze started blowing and his shirt billowed up.

Mark was thirsty. Which made him think of another time when he’d been thirsty.

A few days after Decker had showed up in Baku, looking for a place to stay, Mark had needed to drive out to the mountains west of the city, to interview a 102-year-old Azeri man who’d worked with Soviet intelligence in the 1920s. It was research for his book.
Mark had been reluctant when Decker asked to come along, but Decker had proved to be a decent traveling companion—he’d just bought a copy of
Interview with the Vampire
from a secondhand bookstore in Baku, and had read for most of the car ride out. Which had been fine with Mark—small talk annoyed him.

The only problem was that the final seven-mile stretch of road to the village where the old man lived had washed out the week before. Finishing the journey on foot wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that Mark took a wrong turn early on—a mistake he only figured out after he and Decker had been climbing for three hours. They’d been forced to slog back down the way they came. And then start up the right trail.

The thing was, Mark had been sweating like crazy, and he hadn’t packed any water for the trip. After several hours of hard hiking, Decker had offered him his half-full water bottle. Mark had refused it at first, but Decker had insisted that he didn’t need it because he had a second one in his pack.

Mark had been grateful for that water. But then he realized he’d never seen Decker pull out a second bottle. So when they finally got to the village, and Decker went to take a leak, Mark had opened Deck’s backpack. There was no other water bottle. Decker had given away his only one.

Mark had never mentioned the incident, but he thought about it now. A guy who would give his only water bottle away to a jackass who had just led him hours up a wrong trail wasn’t the kind of guy who would intentionally screw over an eighteen-year-old kid.

Mark turned to Nuriyev.

“Did Decker know how young Alty was? Would Alty have told him?” Mark let that sit for a moment. “Listen, my colleague and your brother are missing. My government won’t lift a finger to help get them back and neither will yours. I’m trying to help on my own.”

After seeming to consider Mark’s remarks for a while, Nuriyev finally said, “When Alty started working at the British Pub, he became obsessed with all things foreign. And the more he learned, the more unhappy he became in his own country.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Those photos you showed me. I believe they were taken with Alty’s iPhone. I told Alty the phone was a stupid waste of money, but he insisted on buying it.”

“Was it a new iPhone?” Mark remembered that Daria had said the quality of the photos was poor.

“No. Used. He didn’t have money for a new one.”

They stood in silence for a long time. Eventually Mark said, “You said you haven’t heard from your brother in four days.”

Nuriyev didn’t respond.

“But the bartender at the British Pub said Alty has been gone for a week.”

“He wanted me to try to save his job. To make an excuse for him. So he called me. That was the last time I heard from him.”

“Where was he when he called?”

“Iran.”

“Where in Iran?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was my colleague with him?”

Nuriyev sighed. “Come, we must drive to south, toward the mountains.”

Washington, DC

T
HE MEETING HAD
been dragging on for hours. Hundreds of aim points had been considered. Most were easy to approve—radar installations, Revolutionary Guard bases, anti-aircraft batteries…it only took fifteen seconds a slide on average, but every so often they hit a hard one.

“Aim point one thousand sixty-seven,” said the secretary of defense. An address in Esfahan, Iran, came up on the white-board. “Home of Dr. Farid Kermani. Director of the Esfahan Nuclear Technology Center.”

“He lives in a housing complex,” said the national security advisor, “so there is a certainty of civilian casualties, perhaps significant. The complex is located within a quarter mile of the Khaju Bridge, which is around four hundred years old and a big tourist site. If we screw up and hit that bridge, we’ll suffer serious backlash beyond what we’re already in for.”

“How many individuals are on the aim point list?” asked the president.

“Eight, beginning with Dr. Kermani. They represent our best estimate of what constitutes the top nuclear minds in the country. If we can eliminate these people from the equation, the Iranians could be set back several years on top of the time it will take them to rebuild the infrastructure damage we’ll inflict.”

“This is one of the many reasons why we’re not consulting with the Europeans,” added the national security advisor. “We choose the aim points, we take all the blame and all the backlash.
We’ll get hammered for it, and it might mean we’ll be ceding the initiative on some foreign policy goals for the next few years, but we’ll just have to live with that. It’s better than the alternative. Aim point accepted.”

Everyone else concurred.

“Aim point confirmed,” said the president.

Turkmenistan, Near the Border with Iran