The Leveling

She checked her watch. She should start getting ready for work soon. If she was going to call him, she should do it now. But was she overreacting? Just looking for an excuse to call? Or was she looking for an excuse not to call him, when it was obvious she should?

She thought about the first of the three photos. Two men had been exchanging a briefcase. A briefcase full of what?

Daria had a bad feeling about that briefcase.

Call him.

She checked her phone, confirmed that Mark’s contact info was still in it, and hit Dial. His cell number was no longer good—which didn’t surprise her. When he’d been her boss at the CIA, he’d been religious about regularly swapping the SIM card out in his phone; he’d rarely kept the same number for more than a few days. Old habits die hard, she thought. She tried his home phone. The answering machine picked up.

“Mark, this is Daria. Call me back, please, as soon as you get this message. I need you to call Bruce Holtz for me. I’m hoping he knows where I can find John Decker. Something weird’s come up. I wouldn’t bother you if I didn’t think it might be important.” Then she left her number.

She’d sounded professional, she thought. Nothing more.





10


Baku, Azerbaijan



MARK TOOK ONE step into his apartment and stopped short.

The bookshelves in the living room had been torn apart, and the hand-knotted Azeri carpets he’d hung on the wall had been ripped down. The kitchen cabinets had been pulled open, and glass jars of red pasta sauce lay shattered on the tile floor. All the furniture cushions had been slit; white stuffing protruded from them like entrails.

In the center of his living room, three twentysomething uniformed officers from the Ministry of National Security sat on his mutilated leather couch, smoking cigarettes and using one of his kitchen plates as an ashtray. One of them stopped mid-laugh when he saw Mark and his escorts.

“What the hell?” said Mark.

The security officers stood as one. The tallest demanded to know who Mark was.

Mark stood there in shock for a moment, taking it all in. His easy chair, where he liked to read in the early evening, when natural light spilled in from the balcony, had been flattened. The tomato plants he’d kept outside had been overturned. The little American flag he’d stuck in one of the planters lay on the floor half-covered with potting soil. “I live here.”

One of his plainclothes minders from the Ministry of National Security nodded in confirmation.

Mark’s apartment building was a gleaming modern construction, completed just two years ago as part of the oil-fueled gentrification that was sweeping the city, but he’d always loved the literal window into history his balcony had afforded him—the end of the Cold War, the ruins of an empire he’d helped, in a very small way, to bring down…Past the sliding glass doors leading onto his balcony, he could see the top of the old Dom Soviet, a government building that had been built during the Stalin era. Next to the Dom Soviet sat the Absheron, an enormous, bulky Soviet-era hotel that had recently been turned into a high-priced Marriott.

“It was like this when we got here,” said one of the officers. He placed his cigarette on Mark’s plate and stood up. “Now we just wait for instructions. The movers are outside. You can gather the things you wish to take with you.”

“You and your men didn’t do this?”

“Of course not.”

Mark wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not.

He walked slowly through his kitchen, stepping over the remnants of a takeout Chinese dinner from the week before. In a way, he thought, it didn’t matter that his place was trashed. What would he have done with his stuff anyway? All it meant was that Orkhan would have less to store.

One question that had been eating away at him—how an assassin had known to find him at the library—was answered by the wall calendar hanging in his kitchen. On today’s date, he’d written 8:30, Heydar, library reading room. He’d bought the calendar after taking the job at Western University, to keep track of his classes. Stupid, he told himself. There were some habits he’d developed while working for the Agency—like an obsession with never keeping a set schedule, and certainly never posting his appointments where people could read them—that, evidently, he should have held on to.

In his bedroom, his dresser drawers had been ripped all the way out, his clothes scattered around the floor, and his mattress slashed. More importantly, his laptop was gone.

He looked around, then back at his desk again, then under it, and then in the closet.

The book-length manuscript he’d been working on, Soviet Intelligence Operations in the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, 1918-1922, had been saved on that computer. Nearly two years of intense research, two hundred thousand words of text. He was only a few months away from finishing it. It was going to be the book that established his academic credentials, his gateway to landing a university job in the States or Europe.

He’d backed it up, though. In several places, just in case.