The Leveling

“If I can come up with proof that the Chinese were screwing with Turkmenistan’s currency, it would be worth something. It’d be intel I could sell.”


“So you really are freelancing as a spy-for-hire. Competing against Holtz.”

Mark hadn’t believed it when he’d heard it from Holtz.

“Something like that. If I can find a way to slow down the China-Iran oil pipeline along the way, great. In the meantime, I have to eat. I need money to live.”

“Fantastic. Sounds like a plan.”

“Don’t give me that.”

“I’m just saying.”

“You know, this might come as a shock to you, but I’ve actually put some thought into what I’m doing. I tried going home.”

“For how long?”

“Long enough.”

“Sometimes it takes a while to really change gears.”

“Yeah. Like you’d know.”

“So say you get the proof you want that the Chinese are screwing with Turkmenistan’s currency. Who do you sell it to? The Americans?”

“Or the Turkmen, or the Russians. I’d even sell it back to the Chinese if they wanted to pay me to keep it quiet.”

Everything that Mark knew about Daria suggested she was an idealist. To a fault.

A suicide mission to scuttle the Iran-China pipeline was right up her alley. Making money off the Chinese by selling them back incriminating intel, that was a stretch. He looked around at her dismal living quarters and reconsidered. Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe she was desperate; maybe she just really needed the money.

“I’ve already found out enough to be worth plenty,” she said.

Daria stood up, walked to her bedroom, and came back with a large black imitation-leather shoulder bag. From the way she was handling it, Mark could tell it was heavy. She dropped it on the table and pulled out a bound stack of brightly colored Turkmen manats. “If you add up everything in this bag, it comes to about twenty thousand dollars. All counterfeit. I have videotape of these bills being exchanged by Guoanbu agents at the InterContinental.”

“You stole this from the Guoanbu?”

“It’s not like it’s real money.”

Mark picked up the stack of manats. The Guoanbu was China’s Ministry of State Security, their main overseas intelligence agency. They were like the CIA, only a lot meaner. Daria was playing with fire. “How can you tell they’re counterfeit?”

“The little horse you see in the center of the Turkmen star—in the real bills it’s screwed up, but in the counterfeit bills, it’s perfect. North Korean work, I figure.”

Mark squinted at the top bill for a bit but his eyesight wasn’t what it once was. He handed the manats back to Daria. “You think Deck got involved in any of this?”

“He shouldn’t have. He was just there to protect State Department negotiators.”

“But you think he did.”

“It’s a possibility. When I think of what could have gone wrong over there, this is what comes to mind.”





23




WHEN DECKER WOKE up, his bare back was pressed against the cold safe and he was shivering. He wondered when he’d last had anything to eat.

He thought back to when he was just a kid, eating pancakes in his mother’s kitchen with his dad and older brother and sister. They’d had syrup from the sugar maples in the woods out back, and lots of butter. Sunny Delight orange drink. Bacon. My God, what he would give to be able to go back, maybe take Daria with him to meet—

Stop it.

No more Narnia, no more South Beach, no more Daria, no more pancakes. You’re hungry. So what. Focus.

He slid his legs through his arms, so that his cuffed hands were in front of him. Dirt had accumulated in both the entry and exit gunshot wounds on his leg, so he lowered his head and cleaned the wounds with his mouth like a dog. He spit out the dirt and kept at it until the wounds bled a bit.

Now what?

Now you think about how to get your ass out of here. For starters, where is here?

Decker recalled the exposed ceiling joists, cinder-block walls, and smell of mold in the room above him. He’d been certain it was a basement. But he was below that room now, in a cellar below the basement.

He forced himself to stand. He couldn’t see a thing, but he could feel that the wall he was bracing himself against was made of brick. He ran his finger across the mortar joints. They felt solid. When he pounded the wall with his elbow, the bricks didn’t move. He ran his hand over every inch of the wall. It was in decent shape all the way down to the rotted bits of floor planks that ringed the perimeter of the hole.

The rotted floor planks, and the dirt beneath them, felt damp on his bare feet. He could try to start tunneling down through the floor. But in what direction? And he was presumably deep underground. He’d be found out long before he made much progress. If that was his only option, he’d try to make a go of it, but he was almost certain the effort would be futile.