The Leveling (21 page)

Holtz looked at her and rolled his eyes. “Oh, great.”

“So this is the deal,” said Holtz. “A few weeks ago, inflation starts going through the roof here—”

“Daria already told me about all that,” said Mark.

“Yeah, well, what she doesn’t know is that Decker figured out why. Turns out it was the ChiComs. They were printing counterfeit money. Tons of it, just dumping it on the market.”

“
I
told you I thought it was the Chinese before I left,” said Daria. “You wouldn’t listen. I told Decker that too.
That’s
how he figured it out.”

“You told me rumors. Decker brought me evidence.”

“What evidence?” asked Mark.

“Decker knew this bartender. Hell, he knew a lot of bartenders, which was kind of an issue with me, but one did black market currency exchange on the side.”

“Got a name?”

“Decker wouldn’t tell me, said he’d promised not to. Anyway, this bartender tells him the ChiComs are buying up US dollars all over the city.”

“With counterfeit manats,” said Mark.

“Yep.”

“What bar was this at?”

“Decker wouldn’t tell me that either, said he’d be compromising his source. Which was a problem. I couldn’t rat out the ChiComs to the Turkmen just because Decker heard something at a bar; I needed real evidence if the charge was going to stick. So I thought, why not find a way to trace all these dollars that were being bought up? If I could show the Turkmen that they were going straight to the ChiComs, well, then the Turkmen would
have
to boot the bastards. You familiar with RFID technology?”

“No,” said Mark.

Holtz appeared satisfied, but not surprised, by Mark’s ignorance.

“It stands for radio frequency identification,” said Daria. “It’s a—”

“—way to track things,” said Holtz. “Big businesses have starting using it instead of bar codes. They even have passive RFIDs that are like the-head-of-a-pin small and don’t need batteries in the transmitter. With the right transmitter and right receiver, you can track a signal from like a kilometer away. What I did was supply Decker with a one-hundred-dollar bill that had one of these tiny RFIDs inserted into a slice in it. The idea being that Decker’s bartender friend would sell this bill to the ChiComs and then Decker would track where they went. And that’s actually what happened.”

“So where’d he track it to?” asked Mark.

“Last I know he was driving east on the M-thirty-seven toward Dushakh. His bartender buddy was with him.”

“That’s no-man’s-land out there. Who else besides the bartender was helping Decker at this point?”

“I gave him some tips,” said Holtz.

“He’s trained as a SEAL, not as a spy. They’re different crafts.”

“Decker wanted the job, and he was the one who recruited the bartender.”

“Did State know what he was doing?”

“Oh yeah, and by now the Defense Department was in on the action too. Once I told them what the ChiComs were up to, everybody’s interest perked up real good. They were pushing me to find out anything I could, especially since the CIA was just holed up in the embassy, playing it safe.”

“Deck’s a six-foot-four SEAL with blond hair and no formal intelligence training. And he doesn’t speak a word of Turkmen or any other foreign language for that matter.”

“Like I said, his bartender friend was helping him. They were working as a team.”

“You were bullshitting State and DoD, weren’t you?” said Daria.

“What are you talking about?”

“You inflated John’s résumé before being hired by State. So you could charge more for him.”

“Who the hell is John?”

“John Decker. The guy we’re talking about.”

“You don’t know jack shit, Daria.”

“I saw the write-up you provided to State selling them on me. You said—”

“That was a classified document.”

“You said I had extensive paramilitary experience and had operated in war zones. That I had experience with explosives and had been trained as a sniper.”

“You got weapons training with the CIA, along with some paramilitary training. We all did.”

“You lied, Bruce. And you did it because it allowed you to charge State more per day for me. And you did the same thing with Decker. That’s why State and DoD were comfortable with him working in the field. What’d you tell them? That he was trained by one of the CIA’s best?” Daria turned to Mark. “That would be you.”

“I never trained him for an operation like this,” noted Mark, though, now that he thought about it, when Decker had stayed
with him in Baku, they’d spent a lot of time discussing things like surveillance detection techniques, tracking techniques, dead drops, ways to read people’s body language…Decker had been eager to learn everything he could of spycraft. Maybe too eager, Mark thought now.

Daria turned back to Holtz. “How many languages did you say he spoke?”

Holtz turned to Mark. “You know why I had to fire her? Because she was fucking for information. Thought she’d do a little moonlighting, play superspy instead of just doing her damn work as a translator. So she starts balling—”

“You are so full of it,” said Daria.

“—this fat Turkmen deputy energy minister, and the guy’s wife finds out and raises a stink.”

“That’s a total lie.”

“Check with State,” said Holtz to Mark. “They know what happened.”

“You sold John out,” said Daria. “You presented him as something he wasn’t to State, State passed that bad information on to DoD, and because of it—”

“Enough,” said Mark. He turned to Holtz. “When’s the last time you heard from Deck?”

A group of five women, each stooped over and carrying a rolled-up carpet on her back, passed by in front of the Niva. Holtz and Daria and Mark stayed quiet until they were gone.

“After Decker left Ashgabat, we agreed that he wouldn’t try to communicate with me unless he knew he could do so securely. The idea, though, was that he’d only be gone for a day or two tops, just enough time to document where the money went to.”

“What kind of equipment was he carrying?”

“The RFID tracker, a digital recorder with a directional microphone and wire probes, and a digital camera with a high-powered telephoto. He had top-of-the-line surveillance equipment. I paid out the ass for it.”

“Give me your phone,” said Mark to Daria. When she’d handed it over, Mark pulled up the photos Alty8 had sent them and tossed the phone to Holtz. “These mean anything to you?”

Holtz didn’t recognize the mansion and didn’t appear to recognize Decker’s arm. But when he came to the photo of the two men exchanging a briefcase, he said, “Holy shit. That’s Li Zemin, the head of the Guoanbu here in Ashgabat. Did Decker take this picture?”

“Maybe.”

“How much do you want to bet that briefcase is full of hundred-dollar bills? And that one of those bills has an RFID tracker on it?”

“What about the guy with the black turban?”

“Him I’ve never seen before.”

They were quiet for a moment. Mark felt a warm desert breeze on his cheek. He stood up.

Daria stood up too and brushed the fine dirt off the rear of her Turkmen dress. “By the way, Bruce, you can take your noncompete contract and stuff it up your dirty ass.”

“When you get back to the States, and you will, someday you will, honey, I’ll have my lawyers draw up a suit that’ll leave you in the gutter.”

“I’m not going back to the States, and if I ever did, I wouldn’t have a penny to my name.” She opened the driver’s side door to the Niva. “There’d be nothing for you to take.”

Turkmenistan, Near the Afghan Border

T
HE MUD-BRICK HOUSE
rose up like a little knoll on the surface of the flat grassy plain.

Behind the house, an old pickup truck had been driven into a drainage ditch next to an outhouse and a solitary apple tree. A cow stood in the wooden bed of the pickup, unable to lie down because of the way she’d been tied to the cab. Goats had wandered through a hole in the stick-fence enclosure and were grazing on either side of the road.

Li Zemin, chief of mission for the Guoanbu in Ashgabat, pulled up in a jeep with his driver.

He was a tall man with sunken cheeks and an angular jawline. His lips were pressed together in a tight, controlled line that was neither a smile nor a frown, and his alert-looking eyes suggested intelligence. Although he held no military rank, his uncle—the man who’d raised him from the age of two—was a high-ranking army general and member of China’s powerful Central Military Commission. Partially because of this connection to power, but also because rumors of Zemin’s ruthless management of the Turkmen Guoanbu had reached the army, the special forces Chinese soldiers who stood in front of the house snapped to attention as Zemin passed by.

Zemin tipped his head in acknowledgment. Then he ordered one of the soldiers to get the cow down from the pickup truck and set it free to graze in the surrounding grassland.

His inspection of the site was perfunctory. The men who had been killed in the raid were Chinese Uighur separatists who had
been harbored by the Taliban, then driven by the Afghan government across the border into Turkmenistan.

As Zemin was paging through a Qur’an that had belonged to one of the separatists, checking it for handwritten codes that the military might have missed, a call came through on his satellite phone. When he saw where it was from, he excused himself and walked alone back to his stripped-down Chinese-made Hafei minitruck.

He picked up the phone, spoke his name, and then listened to the circumstances of John Decker’s escape and recapture.

“I must also inform you that the interrogation is not going well,” said the caller. “My men are not properly trained for such work.”

“Perhaps it is possible to get men that are?” Zemin was careful not to let sarcasm seep into his tone.

“Certainly. But not men that I trust. Understand, I did not anticipate that you would be followed. Had I known this to be a possibility, I would have made different arrangements.”

I did not anticipate you would be followed.

Over the years, Zemin had learned to consider his emotions as he might a wild dog on the street, as something outside of himself that one should keep an eye on but not be controlled by.

But the American John Decker
had
followed him. That Zemin couldn’t deny.

And that failure had been compounded by the Guoanbu’s inability to contain Sava. Yet.

“I will have two men for you within twenty-four hours,” said Zemin.

“Set a flight plan for Tehran, divert to Karaj. I’ll have them met at the airport so they won’t need to go through customs.”