The Leveling (30 page)

Mahmoud turned back to Mark and Daria. “The photo you showed me is of a palace you will find in north Tehran. The brother of Amir Bayat lives there. He is a high-ranking ayatollah and the leader of the Guardian Council.”

“I know of him,” said Daria.

“I will shed no tears if harms comes to him during the hunt for your friend. But be careful, my dear. Ayatollah Bayat is a dangerous man. He is like the merchant, a man you can’t reason with. He will
never
change.”

Daria examined the photo. “I thought public officials were supposed to live humbly.”

“The palace was one that the Shah kept for his family and guests. It is an architectural monstrosity that mocks Iran. Ayatollah Bayat gets away with living there because it is owned by the government and he occasionally uses it for official Guardian Council functions. He says he doesn’t have a home, that he sleeps at his office. It is a fiction, of course. It is his home. I will make a map for you to show you where it is.”

They left a few minutes later. After Mahmoud had dropped them back off in the parking garage, Mark asked, “What happened to his son?”

“He was hanged, in public.”

When Daria didn’t elaborate, Mark pressed her. “Because?”

“Because he was gay.” After they’d walked in silence for a while, Daria added, “A year later, Mahmoud’s wife killed herself. I found out about it from people at the bazaar—that’s why I tried to recruit him, I thought he might still harbor a grudge.”

“I take it he does.”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

Tehran, Iran

I
N THE FRONT
of Ayatollah Bayat’s mansion, wide white-marble steps led up to a spacious portico ringed by Greek columns. Deep-set balconies were lit by chandeliers on the upper levels of the house.

The mansion stood behind a tall fence and was the only structure in the vicinity surrounded by any expanse of land, consisting of nearly two acres’ worth—Mark guessed—of poorly tended lawn and limbed-up plane trees. Overgrown bushes grew on the perimeter of the property, and weeds had crept up out of the cracks in the main driveway. A stagnant reflecting pool lay in front of the main entrance. Two guards stood at attention at the front gate.

Mark and Daria drove up to a point well above the mansion and parked on the street. Mark took out a pair of binoculars he’d bought downtown and studied the grounds.

“They have dogs there.”

“Unlikely,” said Daria. “Religious Iranians think dogs are unclean.”

He handed her the binoculars. “Check out the little white flags. They’re in the middle of the lawn and under the trees on the left. It’s an invisible fence.”

“What do they need an invisible fence for? They’ve got a real fence.”

“To keep the dogs away from the house.
Because
religious Iranians think dogs are unclean. The way they have it set up, the
dogs are limited to the outside perimeter of the property, between the invisible fence and the real fence.”

Daria focused the binoculars. “I heard the army started using them in some cases.”

“A guy I know in Baku has a big spread.” Mark was thinking of Orkhan Gambar. “He does the same thing. You get the security of the dogs without having to interact with them.”

Daria looked through the binoculars a little more. “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

Mark noticed the white chimneys on top of the house. “Give me your phone.”

Daria handed it over and Mark brought up the last of the three photos that Decker had e-mailed them, the one in which Decker’s raised hand appeared against a white background. He showed it to Daria.

“That white part look anything like a chimney to you?”

Daria studied the photo. “Maybe.” She looked at it some more, then down at the house itself. “Yeah, it does. What the hell was John thinking?”

“That he was trapped up on the roof and about to get caught. So he did his best under pressure to give us a trail to follow.”

Mark figured that Decker had been using the roof as a surveillance post from which to spy on Ayatollah Bayat. And that he likely would have had surveillance equipment on him. Decker wouldn’t have wanted that equipment to fall into the wrong hands.

“Shit,” said Mark.

“Are you thinking—”

“Rally on me. That was the hand signal. And he was standing in front of one of those chimneys.”

They both stared at the house for a while until Mark reluctantly said, “If I’m going to do this, we’re going to need some more equipment.”

A
LTHOUGH BOTH OF
his new jailers spoke fluent English, Decker guessed from their facial features that they were Chinese. One wore a white T-shirt and gray slacks, the other a white T-shirt and blue slacks.

Blue apologized to Decker for his previous treatment, gave him a shirt and pants, a little food and drink, set his broken ankle, and allowed him to sleep for a few minutes.

Gray woke Decker up, stripped him naked, poured cold water all over him, hit his broken ankle with a baseball bat, and forced Decker to stand by strapping a noose made of electrical wire around his neck so that if he fell, he’d hang.

Blue said that he hated this kind of inhumane treatment and wanted to find a way to make it stop. If only Decker would help…

Beyond the good-cop-bad-cop routine, Decker knew what they were doing—they’d stripped his clothes off to strip him of his identity, in order to build a new, more dependent and compliant one. They’d had him stand with a broken ankle and a noose around his neck to make him feel that if he fell, he’d be committing suicide.

Why are you doing this to
yourself?
Let us help you.

Break apart a person’s identity and then give them a false sense of being able to guide their own destiny. These guys knew exactly what they were doing.

Time bent into strange, hallucinogenic contortions. He spent long periods downstairs in the safe, his mouth pressed up to one of the holes that had been drilled through the metal, afraid that
if he drifted off to sleep his mouth would fall from the hole and he’d die from lack of oxygen.

After hours or days—Decker wasn’t sure—Gray hauled him up from the pit and injected him with what he said was a truth serum. Real truth serums didn’t exist, Decker knew. There were drugs like sodium pentothal that could make you less inhibited, but just because you were more inclined to talk didn’t mean you felt some pressing need to tell the truth while you were talking.

“There is no shame in sharing information with us,” said Blue. “This drug is so strong. No one is able to resist it.”

A ready-made excuse to give in. They were screwing with his mind, with his pride.

“You would personally be doing me a great favor,” said Blue.

Decker said nothing. Blue left the room. Gray strung him up again with the noose around his neck. The pain that shot through Decker’s ankle and wounded thigh made his legs shake. The drug compromised his ability to balance. He started wheezing and drooling.

When Blue returned he said, “I have spoken with my superiors. They have agreed that if you are generous enough to help us with this matter, we can arrange for a cash payment to you of three hundred thousand dollars plus transport to the border of your choice.”

It was just a bullshit ploy to get him to talk, he knew. But there was an irrational voice inside him that wanted to believe the offer was real, that he could walk away from all this with a bit of cash and his life intact…

His legs began to buckle. He felt pressure on his neck—the weight of his own body pulling him down into the noose. White spots danced in front of his eyes. Everything started playing in slow motion.

“I beg of you,” said Blue. “You can go free if you help us now.”

Decker was past being able to speak.

Gray came up and kicked Decker’s legs out from under him. He put his mouth right next to Decker’s ear, so that he could be heard over the choking sounds.

“Soon I will start cutting. Your fingers, your eyes, your dick, your asshole. I’ll keep you alive so you can watch as I cut you down to a stump. If you still don’t talk, I’ll pick up children from the street and kill them in front of you until you tell us what we want to know.” He spoke with the quiet confidence of someone who was absolutely insane.

“Don’t let him do this, friend,” said Blue. “Help me to stop him. He’s mad!”

Decker passed out. When he regained consciousness, he was being dragged down into the dank pit. They stuffed him in the safe and slammed the door shut.

The sound of his unsteady breathing reverberated in the small space. After a while, the air warmed up.

Decker’s father was a big man, with strong arms. He felt his father’s arms around him now, followed by the strange sensation of having reentered his mother’s womb, of ending where he’d started.

It’s over.

At least the path forward was now clear. He still had his teeth. He could kill himself by tearing open his wrist. The sodium pentothal was still coursing through him; it probably wouldn’t even hurt if he did it now.

Decker twisted his head to the right and put his mouth to one of the air holes. He didn’t want to do it. He loved this world, loved his family, loved himself, loved being alive. But he didn’t have a choice. He had to do it soon.

Before they came back for him.

Tehran, Iran

M
ARK EYED THE
fence surrounding Ayatollah Bayat’s estate. Made of decorative wrought iron, it was ten feet tall and topped by sharp black spikes. He figured it would have taken Decker an effortless two seconds to vault right over it.

It was one in the morning, and he was standing in an alley across the street. He was tired. He tried to do a few last-minute stretches. Crap, he thought. He was too old for this.

He tried to rile himself up by thinking about his ransacked apartment in Baku and the loss of his book.

Nothing, no anger whatsoever.

He remembered the call from Decker’s father. Do this for him, do it for Decker’s mother, do it for Decker.

He eyed the spikes on top of the fence again.

Or not. Suffering through god-awful, heart-wrenching tragedy was just part of the human condition. It wasn’t his job to try to fix everything for everybody.

Then he thought about what Daria would think of him if he backed out.

Shit, he was really going to have to do this.

A couple of minutes later, he heard the sound of squealing tires and crunching metal. Then the horn of the stolen Paykan began to wail. That would be Daria, he knew. Evidently
she
wasn’t having any last-minute doubts.

The German shepherd guard dogs that had been released at midnight started snapping their jaws and barking like crazy.
Mark counted three of them racing off. The two guards by the front gate also took off at a run.

Mark couldn’t see the Paykan on the opposite side of the estate, but if Daria had done her job well, the guards would find it lodged in the fence. Spray-painted on the hood, in Farsi, would be the words
Death to the Guardian Council!
and
Independence, Freedom, Iranian Republic!