The Leveling

He turned his attention to Decker’s gear bag. It was black and coated with a thin layer of rubber. He placed it on his lap and quickly unzipped it.

Inside was a Canon SLR camera with an enormous telephoto lens, a tin of Skoal Straight chewing tobacco, a Leatherman pocket tool, a digital voice recorder, a tangle of high-gauge wires, a directional microphone, a couple of LED penlights, spare batteries, spare SD memory cards for the recorder and the camera, an RFID reader that looked like it had been modified to expand its range, and a wedge of cheese that stank.

The can of chewing tobacco had a price sticker on it—Mt. Dustan General Store, $5.59.

Mark exhaled and closed his eyes for a half second. That store was located in northern New Hampshire—at a place called Wentworth Location, which wasn’t even really an actual town, just a name on the map. Decker had a brother who would buy twenty tins of dip at a time at Mt. Dustan’s and airmail them to whatever foreign backwater Decker happened to be in.

Mark remembered when Decker had stayed with him in Baku. Beer bottles, left on the counter half-filled with dip spit, had been an issue.

As he tossed the tin of dip to the floor, he wondered whether he was looking at the belongings of a dead person.

“If anyone could survive, it would be John,” said Daria, reading his thoughts.

That’s what they always said about those super-fit guys who tried to climb Everest, or sail around the world, countered Mark in his head. The rescuers never wanted to give up hope because the people they were searching for were the best of the best. But nine times out of ten, the super-fit guy was still found dead. Everyone had their limits.

“Keep driving while I assess the rest of this,” he said. “I’ll be quick.”

The digital camera had over five hundred high-resolution still pictures, chronicling every step of Decker and Alty’s journey as they followed the marked money from downtown Ashgabat to Tehran. Mark speed-clicked through them. There were several of Li Zemin handing a briefcase to Amir Bayat in Mashhad. A series of what Mark believed to be Amir Bayat’s house in Tehran followed, then of Ayatollah Bayat’s gated estate in northern Tehran. Decker had taken close-up shots of street signs and house numbers along the way, pinning down exact locations.

Some were photos that Alty—a slender, baby-faced kid with a bowl-shaped haircut—and Decker had taken of themselves: there they were in front of the gates of the Imam Reza shrine complex, then in front of the Azadi Tower in downtown Tehran, then in front of the gates of Tehran University, looking like tourists…

It was as though the pair had been on a low-budget backpacking excursion, yukking it up the whole way.

“Jesus, Deck.”

Daria turned onto a highway, slowed down to the speed limit, and picked up the digital recorder. “There’s a decent amount of voice data on this thing,” she said, after giving it a cursory look.

She played the earliest file. At the start of it, Decker explained that the recording was made in Mashhad, at the Ali Qapu Hotel. Apparently he’d bugged Amir Bayat’s room.

Deck’s voice was cool and professional.

There were extended phone conversations, primarily Amir Bayat speaking with his news department back in Tehran and calls to room service…Daria translated the Farsi to English as she drove. Mark kept studying the cache of digital photos.

The final batch of digital recordings, according to Decker’s voice-over, was from Ayatollah Bayat’s mansion in northern Tehran.

“That’s what the wires holding Decker’s gear bag in the chimney were for,” said Mark. “They were microphone wires. Decker was bugging the place through the chimneys.”

The very last recording consisted of a short conversation between a man who Mark and Daria decided must have been Ayatollah Bayat and a woman they guessed was his wife. The two spoke formally about what meal the wife should prepare for dinner the following evening, when guests were expected.

The breakthrough came after a lull in the conversation, when Ayatollah Bayat’s wife announced, “Amir has arrived.”

Ayatollah Bayat and his brother greeted each other, and for over a half hour they talked politics, mostly deliberating over how a young ayatollah seeking an appointment to the Guardian Council could be thwarted. Then a door closed. After an extended silence, they finally got down to business.

Khorasani suspects something.

Why do you say this?

The intelligence ministry is investigating Hashemi.

For what?

He purchased a new car. A Peugeot 405, and he paid in cash.

The fool.

He was told to wait to use the payments.

This is the problem with involving men like Hashemi.

But I had no choice. He was my only link to the Damascus katsa.

Can the payments be traced to you?

I never communicated with him directly.