The Leveling

Holtz pointed a long finger at Mark. “I’m warning you. Don’t. Go. There. I will find a way to fuck you over, and that is a promise.”


Mark stood and began walking to the door. “You’re embarrassing yourself, Bruce. I’m outta here.”




Holtz caught up with Mark outside.

“Hold on, buddy. Jesus, don’t be such a dickhead. I had a contract with the State Department. That’s why I was in Turkmenistan. I hired your guy Decker to protect State diplomats and stand around and look tough.”

“A contract to do what?”

Sounding ruffled, Holtz said, “Help State get some leverage with the Turkmen before the ChiComs sign deals that’ll guarantee they, and they alone, get to spend the next hundred years sucking every last drop of gas and oil out of the region.”

That bit of news didn’t surprise Mark.

The Americans, Russians, and Chinese—or to Holtz, ChiComs, short for Chinese communists—had long been waging diplomatic and intelligence wars on multiple fronts as they fought over Central Asia’s resources. It was the New Great Game, and it had kept Mark employed for years.

As for the specific case of Turkmenistan, that country happened to be sitting on top of huge natural gas reserves. A lot of that gas currently went north through aging Russian pipelines, and the Turkmen had recently inked a deal to send some of it to the Arabian Sea via Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the Chinese were pressing hard to get the Turkmen to send the bulk of their natural gas east, to China.

At the same time, Mark knew that the Chinese had signed a secret deal to build a huge oil pipeline from Iran to China, which would cross through both Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. That’s what the eruption of violence in Baku eight months ago had been about. State would be doing everything they could to get the Turkmen to deny or delay extending transit rights.

“How’d it go?” Mark asked.

“Shitty. Negotiations broke down two days ago and we got kicked out of the country. Decker never showed up for the plane home. I’ve asked the Turkmen to try to figure out where the hell he is, but so far I haven’t gotten a response. Needless to say, this is a bit of a clusterfuck for me.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. That’s what I know.”

“Where was Decker staying in Turkmenistan?”

“President Hotel, big place in Ashgabat. I will say this—not long after I hired him, he gave me the name of this half-Iranian ex-CIA girl who speaks Turkmen and half a dozen other languages. Daria Buckingham. You know her?”

“You could say that.”

“Yeah, she worked in Azerbaijan for a while, so I figured.”

“I was under the impression she’d gone back to the States.”

What the hell was Daria doing working for Holtz?

“Guess she came back. Anyway, there’s only a handful of people out there who can translate Turkmen so I hired her, and for the next two weeks Decker was like a tick on her ass. It was embarrassing. He really had a thing for her, always following her around, which I don’t get because if you ask me, she’s a first-class bitch. But if you want to find out about Decker, you might start by talking to her. Don’t fucking look at me like that, I’m just telling you what I know.”

“What did Daria say when you talked to her?”

“I haven’t.”

“You’re really leaving no stone unturned here, aren’t you? Mounting a real manhunt.”

“I had to fire her a couple weeks ago, long before we got kicked out of the country. I’m the last person she’d talk to.”

“Fire her for what?”

“It’s confidential.”

“Where is she now?”

“Almaty, I think. I heard she was trying to run private intelligence ops against the ChiComs.”

Almaty was only 150 or so miles northwest of where they were now, in Kazakhstan. Mark figured he could be there in a few hours.

“Try the InterContinental,” said Holtz. “I heard she’s working there as a concierge, probably just to gain access to the ChiComs who hang out there, but who knows, maybe she’s just hard up for money.”





16




DECKER WOKE UP to someone punching his solar plexus. When he tried to fight back, he found that he couldn’t because his arms had been immobilized.

Someone yanked him up to a sitting position and then onto a metal chair. He wondered how long he had been unconscious. Minutes? Days? His head was still throbbing, and his left leg was excruciatingly stiff and swollen.

“I wanted you to see this.”

Metal bit into his wrists. Old-style handcuffs, he determined. He turned toward the voice, but someone shone a bright light in his eyes. He blinked and squinted.

Absorb the pain, don’t fight it.

“Turn down the light for our guest, please.”

As Decker’s eyes adjusted, a form slowly took shape in front of him—it was a man, he realized, slumped in a wooden chair. A small man. Perhaps just a boy.

“Do you recognize your friend?”

It took Decker another moment to get a grip on his pain, to understand it and accept it and probe its limits. When he did, he was able to recognize the figure in front of him.

Alty.