The Leveling (31 page)

Another guard emerged from the black woods, sprinting to the front of the mansion.

Mark eyed the fence one last time, ran at it, and found a purchase for his feet on the intricate scrollwork about halfway up. Spikes jabbed into his chest as he tried to swing his body over the top. The crotch of his pants ripped, and the five-inch knife strapped to his ankle got caught on one of the spikes.

It took him a few seconds to kick himself free.

He hit the grass and felt a sharp pain in his kidneys as he fell on his back, but in an instant was up and racing across the open lawn toward the mansion.

Within seconds he had reached a gutter downspout. The copper was green with age and anchored into the brick. He began to shimmy up as best he could.

Voices were screaming out from the site of the Paykan accident.

Although he was wiry and strong, Mark nevertheless kept slipping down until he found he could gain more traction by wedging his foot between the gutter and the wall.

About halfway up, he noticed handprints other than his own—visible because they had disturbed the copper’s green patina—going up the length of the downspout.

The space between the handprints was huge.

He imagined Decker running at the wall, leaping up and grabbing the downspout ten feet off the ground, then scaling the rest within seconds.

Mark felt himself slip. If the guards had half a brain, he thought, one of them would do a perimeter sweep soon. He strained to shimmy up the rest of the way. Lifting himself over the lip of the gutter nearly proved too much. By the time he was actually sitting on the tile roof, he was exhausted, but he forced himself to keep going until he reached the ridgeline.

The first of the three chimneys was ten feet away. He checked his watch—thirty seconds behind schedule—then removed a small penlight from his pocket and inspected the exterior of the first chimney, looking for a sign from Decker. He inspected the flashing and tiles around the chimney, pulling them back, looking for a piece of paper, or anything that Decker might have left behind. He pulled himself up over the top of the chimney and stuck his head inside.

Nothing.

Below him, the guards were trying to push the Paykan off the fence. He could see them clearly, which meant they could see him too, if they chose to look up.

An inspection of the exterior of the second chimney revealed nothing, but this time, when he reached his hand into the blackened interior, he felt a collection of loose wires. The wires had been affixed to a piece of metal protruding from the interior of the chimney. When he tugged on the wires, there was resistance, as though something were tied to the end of them.

Mark pulled up a small waterproof gear bag with a shoulder strap, detached it from the wires, and stuffed it into his backpack.

Police sirens drew near.

One of the guards who had left the front gate returned to his post, putting him in a direct line of sight to the gutter downspout.

From his backpack, Mark pulled out a glass liter bottle filled with gas and screwed off the cap. He took a rag, twisted it into the narrow mouth of the bottle, held the bottle upside down for
a moment to saturate the rag with gas, lit the whole contraption with a lighter, and threw it.

The Molotov cocktail arced over the edge of the roof, leaving little airborne droplets of fire in its wake. It crashed into a walled courtyard that abutted the side of the mansion opposite his exit route.

Cries rang out from inside the mansion. When the guard by the gate ran off to investigate, Mark took off across the roof, running as silently as he could on the tiles. He crawled down spiderlike from the ridge and, without pausing, swung his body over the edge. His feet found the gutter downspout, and he slid down quickly, so quickly that he lost his grip halfway down.

He landed on a bush, dazed but still able to move, then pulled himself to his feet and sprinted across the lawn, making no effort now to avoid detection. Halfway across, he heard barking and glanced to his right. A lone German shepherd was coming at him at top speed, snapping its jaws. Mark tried to sprint faster, but his legs wouldn’t respond—it was as if he were running through water. The fence was only a few strides away.

He turned and threw his forearm up just as the German shepherd lunged. The dog took his forearm in its jaws and bit down with an intense pressure that sent spikes of pain shooting up his arm even through his makeshift armor—five metal school rulers lashed together with surgical tape under a leather jacket. He was knocked to the ground. The dog growled and shook its head, trying to grind its teeth in deeper.

Pepper spray was illegal in Iran, but wasp spray was a decent substitute. With his free hand, Mark grabbed a small can from his jacket pocket, aimed, and shot a stream of pesticide into the dog’s eyes. The dog held on to his forearm for a moment, but then let go, confused and snapping its jaws as best it could, as though unsure where this new enemy was.

“Sorry, buddy.”

A guard sprinted out from the corner of the mansion.

Mark dropped the wasp spray and ran. As he was pushing himself over the points at the top of the fence, he heard gunshots. He fell to the ground on the opposite side and stumbled toward the road, where Daria was waiting for him in yet another stolen Paykan. The passenger side door opened and he fell into the car.

Washington, DC

T
HE PRESIDENT OFTEN
ate a light dinner at his desk, but tonight he found the veneer of normalcy—a glass of whole milk, a chicken salad sandwich on whole wheat bread, and a bowl of baby carrots—to be strangely unsettling.

Get outside, take a walk. You’ll think better.

He looked out the window to the white blossoms on the crabapple trees in the Rose Garden. The tulips were in full bloom, and there were hundreds of them, brilliant yellows and reds. Spring was his favorite time of year in Washington, he thought.

The pressure was getting to him. He could feel it in his chest and in the way he felt weak in his joints. Perhaps his critics were right, perhaps he was too old to be president.

His chief of staff appeared at the door, clipboard in hand.

“Hello, Patty.”

“Mr. President.”

“How you holding up?”

“I’m holding. I’ve cleared your original schedule as much as possible so that you can chair the NSC planning meetings, but you’re going to need to meet with the president of Ghana at one tomorrow or people are going to get suspicious that something’s up.”

“Fine.”

The chief of staff handed the president a revised schedule for the next twenty-four hours. He was relieved to see that four hours had been blocked off for him to sleep.

“We’ll also need to carve out time to work on your address to the nation. Simmons will have a draft ready by three.”

“Schedule the meeting with Simmons for eleven tonight and push back the call to Jouanneau,” he said, referring to the president of France. “Have you gotten final clearance for the timing of the address from CENTCOM?”

“It was my wakeup call this morning. We’re good for three tomorrow afternoon.”

Tehran, Iran

D
ARIA MADE A
few quick turns, rocketed down a long hill, made another turn, and then parked right behind yet another Paykan, which she and Mark transferred into.

“One of the dogs found me,” Mark said, struggling to catch his breath as Daria sped down a narrow alley, brushing within inches of parked cars.

“I saw.”

“I had to spray him.”

The dog was just another victim, thought Mark. It was stupid to feel that kind of sympathy, he knew, but he liked dogs, and he was sick of watching innocent bystanders, be they dogs or people, being hurt by events they didn’t understand and couldn’t control.

He turned his attention to Decker’s gear bag. It was black and coated with a thin layer of rubber. He placed it on his lap and quickly unzipped it.

Inside was a Canon SLR camera with an enormous telephoto lens, a tin of Skoal Straight chewing tobacco, a Leatherman pocket tool, a digital voice recorder, a tangle of high-gauge wires, a directional microphone, a couple of LED penlights, spare batteries, spare SD memory cards for the recorder and the camera, an RFID reader that looked like it had been modified to expand its range, and a wedge of cheese that stank.

The can of chewing tobacco had a price sticker on it—
Mt. Dustan General Store, $5.59
.

Mark exhaled and closed his eyes for a half second. That store was located in northern New Hampshire—at a place called Wentworth Location, which wasn’t even really an actual town, just a name on the map. Decker had a brother who would buy twenty tins of dip at a time at Mt. Dustan’s and airmail them to whatever foreign backwater Decker happened to be in.

Mark remembered when Decker had stayed with him in Baku. Beer bottles, left on the counter half-filled with dip spit, had been an issue.

As he tossed the tin of dip to the floor, he wondered whether he was looking at the belongings of a dead person.

“If anyone could survive, it would be John,” said Daria, reading his thoughts.

That’s what they always said about those super-fit guys who tried to climb Everest, or sail around the world, countered Mark in his head. The rescuers never wanted to give up hope because the people they were searching for were the best of the best. But nine times out of ten, the super-fit guy was still found dead. Everyone had their limits.

“Keep driving while I assess the rest of this,” he said. “I’ll be quick.”

The digital camera had over five hundred high-resolution still pictures, chronicling every step of Decker and Alty’s journey as they followed the marked money from downtown Ashgabat to Tehran. Mark speed-clicked through them. There were several of Li Zemin handing a briefcase to Amir Bayat in Mashhad. A series of what Mark believed to be Amir Bayat’s house in Tehran followed, then of Ayatollah Bayat’s gated estate in northern Tehran. Decker had taken close-up shots of street signs and house numbers along the way, pinning down exact locations.

Some were photos that Alty—a slender, baby-faced kid with a bowl-shaped haircut—and Decker had taken of themselves: there they were in front of the gates of the Imam Reza shrine complex, then in front of the Azadi Tower in downtown
Tehran, then in front of the gates of Tehran University, looking like tourists…

It was as though the pair had been on a low-budget backpacking excursion, yukking it up the whole way.

“Jesus, Deck.”

Daria turned onto a highway, slowed down to the speed limit, and picked up the digital recorder. “There’s a decent amount of voice data on this thing,” she said, after giving it a cursory look.

She played the earliest file. At the start of it, Decker explained that the recording was made in Mashhad, at the Ali Qapu Hotel. Apparently he’d bugged Amir Bayat’s room.

Deck’s voice was cool and professional.

There were extended phone conversations, primarily Amir Bayat speaking with his news department back in Tehran and calls to room service…Daria translated the Farsi to English as she drove. Mark kept studying the cache of digital photos.

The final batch of digital recordings, according to Decker’s voice-over, was from Ayatollah Bayat’s mansion in northern Tehran.

“That’s what the wires holding Decker’s gear bag in the chimney were for,” said Mark. “They were microphone wires. Decker was bugging the place through the chimneys.”

The very last recording consisted of a short conversation between a man who Mark and Daria decided must have been Ayatollah Bayat and a woman they guessed was his wife. The two spoke formally about what meal the wife should prepare for dinner the following evening, when guests were expected.

The breakthrough came after a lull in the conversation, when Ayatollah Bayat’s wife announced, “Amir has arrived.”

Ayatollah Bayat and his brother greeted each other, and for over a half hour they talked politics, mostly deliberating over how a young ayatollah seeking an appointment to the Guardian Council could be thwarted. Then a door closed. After an extended silence, they finally got down to business.