The Leveling

“Let’s look at the pictures,” she said.

Mark pulled the flash drive out of his coat pocket.

“Don’t bother, I’ve got them on my laptop,” said Daria. “They’re in my bedroom.”





20


Almaty, Kazakhstan



DARIA CRACKED HER bedroom door open just enough to slip inside, but Mark was still able to get a glimpse of her setup. A hotel blanket covered a low cot, she’d stacked her clothes on an industrial metal shelf, and a postcard-sized reproduction of van Gogh’s Irises had been affixed to the wall with a pink thumbtack. He thought of Daria going to sleep in there alone, staring up at those irises as the night closed in around her.

She emerged from the room with a new-looking laptop in hand.

“Jesus, Daria. This place depresses me.”

Daria had always been a bit of a loner—the old-school boys at the CIA had never really trusted her, given the Iranian-American mixed-race thing—but not this much of a loner.

“I don’t need your pity.”

“I was just—”

“It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“OK.”

“I’m spying on the Chinese. I’ve only been here a couple weeks. I’m still getting settled, and most of the time I’m at the hotel, which is where all the Chinese government types hang out. Don’t be so quick to judge.”

Mark wondered what it would have been like if, instead of saying good-bye when Daria had been kicked out of Azerbaijan, he’d gone with her to Washington and settled down. What would have happened if he’d taken a few consulting jobs, cashed in on his Agency experience, made some real money, bought a big house…

He had a sense that Daria would have been OK with that scenario. But a big part of him had genuinely thought that she’d have a better chance at a normal life without him. And though he’d fallen for her, and had longed for her after she’d left, he hadn’t wanted to leave Baku.

It occurred to him, though, that just eight months later, she’d failed completely at living a normal life, and he’d had to leave Baku anyway.

Daria opened the photo files. “So we’re talking lousy quality. Worse than even a cheap digital camera.”

She pulled up information about the memory size of each photo, then clicked from one picture to the next, quickly highlighting one detail here and another there, using the laptop as a natural extension of her brain in a way that made Mark feel stupid. Back in the dark ages, when he’d actually spied on people, he’d used film. Since leaving the Agency, it had never occurred to him to take pictures for pleasure.

“The only digital cameras that take these kinds of low-res pictures are kids’ cameras and older cell phones,” she said.

“Focus on Deck’s arm.”

Daria navigated to that window. “I think he was taking a picture of himself—the arm in the photo looks like it’s really close to the camera lens. And from the time stamp on this, I can tell it was e-mailed to us a minute after the photo was taken. So it’s likely John sent the e-mail himself. Why would he—”

“Rally on me,” said Mark.

“What?”

“That’s what Deck’s telling us. You’re leading a squad or platoon or whatever. You want your men to rally around you, come to where you are, but you can’t just yell out the order. Instead you raise your index finger up like Deck’s doing and circle your hand around in the air. That’s why his hand is blurry. He’s circling it.”

“Why not just come out and write that in the e-mail?”

Mark shrugged. “Maybe he was afraid someone would read the e-mail. If he sent this from Turkmenistan, that would have been a legitimate concern. They read everything. Instead, he sent a sign that he knew I would probably understand but that the Turkmen wouldn’t.”

Daria clicked on the next two photos and placed them side by side on her laptop screen. “These two are older—the one of the mansion was taken a day before the arm photo, the one of two guys exchanging a briefcase, two days before. We can assume the man in the black turban is a sayyid, probably a Shiite.”

A sayyid was considered a direct descendant of Muhammad. Most wore black turbans.

“Which narrows it down to what, a few million people?” said Mark. “We could be talking Azerbaijan, Iraq, Iran, and Bahrain…and even if the sayyid in the photo was from one of those countries, it doesn’t mean that’s where the picture was taken.”