The Leveling (15 page)

Ashgabat, Turkmenistan

“W
HAT THE HELL
is
he
doing here?” asked Daria.

She and Mark had landed at Saparmurat Turkmenbashi International Airport at dawn. Even with approved visas, purchased for the Turkmen equivalent of five thousand dollars apiece, they’d spent an hour in airport limbo before an officious luggage inspector was assigned to search their bags. Then they’d spent another half hour waiting for an aging nurse to inspect them, as if they were livestock, for communicable diseases. Then they’d spent another half hour answering routine questions posed by grim-faced bureaucrats who wore hats with comical upturned brims and who wrote painfully slowly in giant ledger books.

It was nearly nine before they were able to catch a cab to the President Hotel.

And now, when they stepped into the cavernous front lobby, intending to start questioning the staff about Decker, they instead ran into Bruce Holtz.

“You got me,” said Mark.

“You didn’t tell him we were coming?”

“Nope.”

Holtz was slumped in a green-and-gold easy chair. Above him hung an enormous crystal chandelier. Two other men in business suits sat at tables nearby. Other than that, the place was empty, which didn’t surprise Mark. He’d stayed at the President a few years back, while visiting the CIA station in Ashgabat. It
was like a lot of things in Ashgabat: superficially fancy, but pretty crappy when you actually got to know it. Its main draw was that it was located right next to the Oil and Gas Ministry.

Holtz looked up when Daria and Mark approached.

“Hello, Bruce,” said Mark.

Holtz took a sip of coffee and motioned to the small table in front of him, upon which sat a basket filled with breakfast pastries. “Join me, please. They brought too much.”

He wore a dark custom-made suit with Gucci wingtip shoes, a gold tie, and gold, diamond-studded cufflinks. His hair was slicked back; a pair of sunglasses, with the Prada logo displayed prominently in gold on the frame, were folded on the table. Mark thought he looked ridiculous, like a Russian gangster on holiday, but he couldn’t fault Holtz for it. That kind of look commanded respect in these parts.

“I take it this is not a coincidence,” said Mark.

“I figured you’d show up here eventually.”

Mark sat down in an adjacent easy chair.

Daria seemed to prefer standing to sitting next to Holtz. “What do you want, Bruce?” she asked.

Holtz turned, as if noticing Daria for the first time. “I see you found her,” he said to Mark, and then he raised his finger for the lounge waitress. “Coffee?”

Mark grabbed a raspberry danish from the basket in middle of the table. “Don’t bother. Cut to the chase, Bruce.”

“You know, Sava, sometimes you can come off as rude.”

“I’ve been told.”

“It occurred to me that we might be in a position to help each other.”

Mark said nothing.

Holtz added, “And that maybe I could have been a little more helpful when you first came to me. Like about where you should start your search for Decker. In fact, I’ll give you a hint right now—not here.”

“If you know where we should be looking, why haven’t you started looking for him yourself?” Daria asked.

Mark could guess at the answer to that question.

Turkmenistan was one of the strangest countries on earth. It had been ruled for years by a megalomaniac who called himself Turkmenbashi, and was now ruled by the late dictator’s dentist. Burdened with an ungodly bureaucracy and obsessed with secrecy, it was as though the Cold War had never ended. Holtz spoke some Russian, which evidently had been enough for him to help the State Department connect with higher-level government types in Ashgabat—Russian was the common language of Central Asia—but he couldn’t navigate the absurdities of Turkmenistan without speaking Turkmen himself. Which he didn’t.

Mark and Daria could speak passable Turkmen, though, because the language was closely related to Azeri, as were many of the other Turkic languages of Central Asia. On top of that, Mark spoke fluent Russian, and Daria spoke fluent Farsi.

“For the same reason that the owner of this hotel doesn’t clean the bathrooms himself,” said Holtz, looking at Daria. “That’s where you come in.”

Mark said, “Enough. What have you got?”

From the inner pocket of his suit coat, Holtz produced a sheet of paper. “This is a contract my attorney drafted last night. I’d like you to sign it.”

Mark picked it up.

The contract said that, for the next five years, Mark agreed to serve as executive vice president of intelligence for CAIN, Incorporated.

“Let me break it down for you,” said Mark. “I don’t really like you, Bruce. Which makes me not want to work for you. And if I sign this, I’m still not going to want to work for you. And that means I’m not going to produce for you, regardless of any contract I may or may not have signed.”

“Relax. I just want to be able to use your name and your résumé to help bring in business.”

Mark didn’t respond.

“You may have to sit in on a few conference calls,” said Holtz. “That’s all. And before you start threatening to tell the Kazakhs about CAIN’s surveillance op up at Atyrau, you might want to think about who hired me to gather that information. Go on, take a guess.”

Mark still didn’t respond.

“Try the US military,” said Holtz. “I fell for your BS blackmail the first time, but then I got to thinking, and I’m not falling for it again. You want to expose your own government? Because that’s what you’d be doing.”

Holtz pushed the contract toward Mark. “I didn’t think so. You get one dollar a year for each of the five years. But if you actually want to go to work and bring in any new business, I’ll give you twenty-five percent of the profits from it. It’s a fair deal. The contract is clear. If you want to do jack squat, you get jack squat but I still get to say you’re part of CAIN. If you want to do more—”

“Hundred thousand yearly retainer for the use of my name, fifty percent of profits from business I bring in.”

“Fuck you.”

Mark glanced at Daria. She looked appalled by the whole exchange.

“I’m also gonna need a little preview on what you have on Decker.”

“I can tell you who he was with when he disappeared, what he was doing, and where he was going. I can’t tell you where he is.”

“Is he alive?”

“I have no idea.”

“Hundred thousand, fifty percent. Keep in mind, I’ve got a good sense of what you’re raking in by bilking State and DoD. I know you can afford it.”

“Fine,” said Holtz. “I accept your terms.”

“I guess that means I should have asked for more.”

“You’re making a mistake, dealing with this asshole,” Daria said to Mark.

Holtz pulled another set of papers out of his inner coat pocket. “One more thing. Noncompete agreements.” To Mark he said, “When you’re working for CAIN, you’re not two-timing me on the side.” To Daria he said, “Yours is the noncompete I should have had you sign when you were working for me. Translator, my ass. I did a little asking around. You were a fucking CIA NOC that went bad. The only reason you were working for me was to gather intel from my operation so that you could start up your own operation and cash in.”

“You can’t enforce a noncompete over here,” said Mark. “What’s the point?”

“Step one foot in the States and they’re enforceable. You guys won’t be hanging out over here forever. Eventually you’ll go back.”

Mark sighed. He figured that, if he put his mind to it, he could find a way to get Holtz to back down. But that would take effort. And besides, he was pretty psyched about the hundred-thousand-dollars-a-year-for-sitting-on-his-butt deal.

Daria said, “This is a joke.”

“Those are
my
terms if you want to know what I know about Decker. Take them or leave them.”

Mark looked at Daria.

“I don’t care,” she said, clearly disgusted. “Let’s just get it done.”

Washington, DC

“I
TALKED TO
the Israeli defense minister an hour ago. At minimum they’re talking about targeting the reactor at Bushehr, the uranium enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordo, and the nuclear-related sites in Arak, Tehran, Ardakan, Darkovin, and Esfahan,” said the secretary of defense.

It was well after midnight. The president was seated in his cramped study just off the Oval Office, cradling his head in his hand. On his desk was a crystal tumbler that held his nightly two fingers of single-malt Scotch—Lagavulin, his favorite. But tonight the Scotch had gone untouched for hours.

The Iranians had pushed too far this time. While the attack on Khorasani’s daughter was appalling, the Israelis probably didn’t even have anything to do with it. And even if they had, what Khorasani planned to do in retaliation was insane. He had to be stopped. It was just a question of whether the Israelis stopped him on their own, or with the help of the United States.

“They should be able to hit those targets on their own,” continued the secretary of defense. “Whether they can actually destroy them all—”

“They can’t.”

“—is another matter.”

“Can we?”

“You’ve read the latest assessment from CENTCOM.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Assuming our targeting intel is good, I agree with CIA and DIA that the odds would be in our favor. But destroying Fordo and confirming that the two nukes we believe are there have been taken out will require a ground team.”

“And your personal view on whether the Israelis can pull off that kind of insertion on their own?” asked the president.

“I’m skeptical. Very skeptical. At the minimum we’d have to allow their helicopters to refuel on one of our carriers, or piss off the Iraqis and find a way to set up a refueling station in western Iraq. They’re close to being able to pull it off, but they’re not there yet.”

Dammit all, thought the president, thinking not of what his secretary of defense had just said—he’d already known the answers, he’d just wanted to hear them one more time—but of the overall predicament. The Iranians had it coming, nobody disputed that, but an attack would come with a cost. He imagined the Iranians mining the bejesus out of the Strait of Hormuz, causing the price of oil to go through the roof and triggering a worldwide depression, while every living Iranian rallied around their idiotic government because they loved their country more than they hated the mullahs who ran it.

Knowing what his friend was thinking, the secretary of defense said, “Don’t forget about a possible invasion or uprising in Bahrain. Sixty-five percent Shiite, and the Iranians would love to get rid of our Fifth Fleet.”

The best-case scenario? The attack successfully wiped out the Iranian nuclear program, oil prices spiked temporarily but the market absorbed it, Iran made a stink and lobbed a few missiles at Israel but backed down because it didn’t want to provoke a land invasion from the United States, and the Saudis and other Sunni dictators cheered silently while their people decided they hated the United States a bit more than they already did.

The president shook his head. It galled him that whatever happened, best case or worst case, the United States would bear
all the costs while China and Russia and even the Europeans would probably reap all the benefits. All because of what had happened to one woman.

“I’ll talk to CENTCOM one more time and then sleep on it,” said the president. “You’ll have my decision by morning.”

Ashgabat, Turkmenistan