The Leveling

The guards threw him into the safe and stuffed his legs up into his chest.

Decker screamed. The pain in his wounded leg was unbearable. He was shaking uncontrollably. The interior walls of the safe pressed against his shoulders. Even with his knees touching his chest, he barely fit in the space.

As the door clanged shut and blackness descended, Decker put his mouth next to one of the air holes that had been drilled through the thick metal. He closed his eyes and began to count again. He was climbing, slowly, steadily, one foot after the other. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the air was clean.





43


Ashgabat, Turkmenistan



DARIA MANEUVERED THE Niva through the crowds outside the Tolkuchka Bazaar. Manhandling the stick shift and honking the horn at everyone who got in front of her helped dissipate some of her anger.

When they reached the road back to Ashgabat, she said, “Holtz was lying about firing me, you know. I don’t do that kind of thing anymore.”

“What bars did Deck hang out at here in Ashgabat?”

“You don’t believe me about Holtz, do you?” she asked.

“I believe you.”

“No, you don’t. But you should. I know you don’t think much of me—”

“That’s not true.”

“People change, Mark. I wouldn’t stoop that low. Not to make money for a piece of shit like Holtz, anyway. You know, he probably told the State Department people the same lie he just told you, just to spite me because I quit.”

“Holtz is a bottom-feeder. There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s just the way he is.”

Daria thought Mark sounded bored by Holtz’s lies. Bored. Which told her exactly where things stood between them. She glanced at him. His eyes looked even more heavy lidded and deep set than usual. He hadn’t shaved in days. It was hard for her to believe that this was the same professorial guy who’d spent over a month nursing her back to health.

She pulled open the dash compartment. “Jesus, I need a cigarette.” She rifled through some papers but came up short.

“When did you start smoking?”

“A week ago, as part of my cover.”

“Forget Holtz. He’s just trying to get inside your head. Don’t let him.”

She wanted to blurt out that it wasn’t Holtz that was getting inside her head, it was him. It was being close to him, without really being close. Talking to him, without really talking.

She considered what little she knew about him, starting with the fact that Mark Sava wasn’t even his real name.

He’d always been guarded, especially about his past. But once he had let slip—this a month into their relationship—that he’d grown up in a run-down neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and had gone to public schools there. When she’d gone back to the States, she’d done some snooping and hadn’t been able to find any record of him in Elizabeth. At least not until she’d paged through several old public school yearbooks and discovered that he’d grown up not as Mark Sava, but rather Marko Saveljic. That had thrown her for a loop. CIA operations officers used aliases all the time, but Mark had been a station chief when he’d left the CIA; he’d been declared to the Azeris and shouldn’t have needed to use an alias. At the very least, once they’d become intimate, Daria thought he should have mentioned what his real name was. She’d also learned—from an obituary on file with a local newspaper—that Mark’s mother had died when he was in his teens.

She tried to imagine him as a young kid, before his mom had died, before life had roughed him up. She tried to picture him as a normal, innocent child playing with his older sister and two younger brothers, climbing on jungle gyms and running through sprinklers.

Back when they’d been living together in his apartment, she might have been able to imagine it. But now? No way. All she saw was a serious kid, back to the wall, sizing up every other kid in the sandbox as he looked for weaknesses to exploit, angles to work. His mind packed with dark secrets. She had no doubt his mom’s death had been a hard blow, but she guessed it was a blow that, if anything, had just pushed him in a direction he’d already been going.

“So are you going to answer my question?” asked Mark, interrupting her thoughts.

“You had one?”

He was a strange man, Daria thought, born with a rare ability to separate his life into distinct and often contradictory compartments, some of which he’d shared with her, most of which he hadn’t and, she was sure, never would.

“Bars. Decker. Where did he hang out? Focus, Daria.”