The Leveling

They spent the next twenty minutes staring at that photo, enlarging it, cropping it, doing everything they could to try to get more information off of it. But the resolution was awful, the background dark, and other than the black turban, the clothes the men wore revealed nothing. They had no better luck with the photo of the mansion. It was adorned with Ionic Greek columns, surrounded by shrubbery, and didn’t look like anything that belonged anywhere in Central Asia or the Middle East, much less Turkmenistan.

Eventually they ran out of things to scrutinize. The room went quiet for a moment, at which point Mark said, “Hey, Daria. You think now would be a good time for you to tell me what you guys were really doing in Turkmenistan?”

For the first time, Daria smiled. “I thought your buddy Holtz already told you.”

“Give me a break. He didn’t tell me shit. I’m not that stupid.”





21




DECKER LAY ON his back, naked and chained to a rusted metal bed frame.

Someone asked him another question, but the English was heavily accented and he couldn’t concentrate well enough to follow it.

He didn’t need to hear the question, though, because the questions were always the same. His captors knew from the photos on the iPhone that he’d followed a trail of money from Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, to the ayatollah’s mansion. What they wanted to know was—why? Who had ordered him to do this? Who else knew that he had done this? Who was the second person he’d e-mailed just before being captured?

Decker figured that the only reason he was still alive was that he hadn’t answered those questions yet. At least not to their satisfaction. What he’d told them was that his partner, the fictional man he still insisted was out there, had hired him to help watch the ayatollah’s house, but that he didn’t know why.

He heard the swish of the truncheon cutting through air. A new burst of pain spiked up through his feet like an electric shock—then coursed up his legs, side, and into his arms until finally it felt as though his brain might just short-circuit.

The bastinado, you know this. You’ve been trained to resist it.

No, not to resist it, to accept it. Don’t fight the pain.

Beating a prisoner’s bare feet, where there were clusters of sensitive nerves, was a common form of torture, Decker knew. During training, he’d inflicted it on fellow SEALs and they’d done the same to him.

Time passed. There was more pain. Men left, men arrived. Decker heard voices whispering in his ear. He couldn’t understand them, though he vaguely realized they were speaking in English.

Through the agony he thought, amateurs. He was beyond listening, beyond being able to respond. The pain racking his body was too great. They were wasting their breath.

After a while, someone unchained him and rolled him off the bed frame. He fell to the carpet, and someone dragged him into a corner. The concrete floor felt blissfully cold on the swelling around his eyes. He watched as the old carpet was pulled back, revealing a trapdoor that two men struggled to lift. When they’d gotten it open, they turned to him. He felt a hand under each of his armpits.

The hole smelled musty and wet. He was thrown in headfirst, unable to break his fall because his hands were still cuffed. He lifted his head up and looked around. The walls were made of brick. The floor was mostly dirt, though remnants of rotted wooden floor planks were visible around the perimeter. When he rolled onto his back, he saw the concrete ceiling was striped with rusted bars of steel rebar. The only object in the hole was an enormous safe.

The heavy trapdoor slammed shut. For a few seconds, rays of light seeped through the cracks where the edges of the trapdoor met the floor. Then he heard boots stomping above him and the carpet was pulled back over the door. Absolute darkness descended.

He crawled on his bare knees through the dirt until he felt the cold metal of the safe. With his cuffed hands, he gripped the handle of it, as though it were a door to another world. The Narnia movie flashed in his disjointed memory. He’d watched part of it with his SEAL buddies in a squad-sized can at a forward operating base in Afghanistan. They’d been waiting to leave on a night mission. Guys had been checking gear, charging spare batteries, going over maps, jacking steel, and taking turns using the freezing shitter next door to rub one out. It had been winter, in the Hindu Kush Mountains. He shivered, as if he were there now.

Pull open the door. It’s a wardrobe that will lead to winter—no, to a beach.

An image of South Beach, Florida, flashed through his head, and he remembered a spring break trip when he was a military cadet at Norwich University. Downing shots, awesome sloppy sex in a bathroom with a girl from Baton Rouge with huge tits, nursing a brutal hangover on the beach…

My God, it had been so fantastically warm on that beach. The hot sand on his back, the hot sun on his face, healing him.

He pulled on the handle to the safe, but it didn’t budge.





22


Almaty, Kazakhstan



“HOLTZ WAS BEING honest with you—up to a point,” said Daria. “He was trying to help the State Department build better relationships with the Turkmen, so the US won’t get shut out of all the oil and gas deals.”

“And helping State lobby the Turkmen on the pipeline from Iran to China.”