The Leveling (36 page)

Decker was still on the floor and seemed completely dazed by the turn of events. Mark repeated the question.

“A little bit.” He stopped to catch his breath. “Out of my right eye.”

“Can you fire a gun?”

“Fuck yeah.”

Mark took a Makarov pistol from the dead Iranian on the steps. “Careful, it’s off safety.”

“Will I need it?”

“I don’t know. I think the house is clear but I haven’t done a sweep.”

He heaved Decker up to a standing position again and together they navigated the steps up to the ground floor.

Decker blinked at the bright natural light spilling in from the windows.

“Daria!” called Mark. “I got him.”

They stumbled into the front foyer. The Paykan was still lodged in the entrance door.

“Back it up,” said Mark. “We’re getting out of here.”

Daria, who’d been concealed behind an overturned table in an adjacent room, showed herself.

“John, God…” She looked horrified. “What did they do to you?”

Decker was filthy, leaning to one side as he favored his good leg, and barely recognizable. He was also buck naked, and the dirt couldn’t hide his massive torso and tree-trunk thighs.

“Back up the car, we’re getting out of here,” Mark repeated.

Daria kept her eyes fixed on Decker.

“Daria, let’s go,” said Mark.

She climbed over the hood of the car and slipped into the driver’s seat. The hood was smashed in, but the car started. She pulled back a few feet. Mark helped Decker to the rear door, intending to seat him opposite Amir Bayat.

Decker took one quick look at Bayat, raised his Makarov, and—without even seeming to think—shot Bayat in the temple.

“I promised him I’d let him live,” said Mark.

“I didn’t,” said Decker.

Northern Iran

T
HE CABIN WAS
tiny, partially hidden by a grove of date palms, and one of twenty in a largely vacant vacation camp that was nestled on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Its roof was covered with quaint-looking thatch that had been put there for show, but the rusted corrugated metal beneath it was visible.

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.

Washington, DC

T
HE 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.