The Leveling

MARK AND DECKER sailed out in the late afternoon from an Iranian fishing town not far from the Azeri border. The boat was only a few meters long, with a single sail. A strong south wind was blowing.

Plenty of other boats were out on the water, eager to catch what fish they could before the predicted rain really started coming down. Most of them were motorized, though, especially the ones that ventured far out into the sea. At ten miles out, Mark’s sail was an anomaly. But everyone would just think he was a crazy caviar poacher, he knew, driven by greed to take risks. And nobody bothered the poachers.

The wind had only started up in earnest a few hours earlier, not long enough to really whip the waves up into a frenzy, and they made good progress gliding over the relatively calm waters. Mark was at the stern, with the tiller in one hand and the mainsheet in the other. Decker sat on a damp cushion a few feet in front of him, wearing a baseball cap and a white dress shirt. He’d rolled the sleeves up on the shirt because it was several sizes too small for him.

When the land behind them disappeared from view, Mark changed his tack so that now they were sailing almost on a full run, doing six or seven knots, he estimated. With the wind at their back, everything became quiet except for the creak of the wooden mast as the boat yawed back and forth. The gray sail, stained over the years by spatters of grease and fish guts, appeared as one with the dark sky.

“Stop for dinner in Lenkoran?” said Decker.

Mark was still amazed at Decker’s powers of recuperation. He was like one of those gag birthday candles whose flame kept relighting itself, no matter how many times you blew it out. The morning after Daria left, Mark had woken up to find Decker wrapping his ankle with long strips of ripped bedsheets. All the food in the cabin had been eaten. Decker had taken more antibiotics and painkillers on his own and had changed the dressing on his gunshot leg. After sleeping for another day, he’d been ready to move.

Mark knew that, to some extent, Decker had to be faking it—no one could bounce back that fast from that kind of abuse. But the fact that he was able to fake it at all was impressive.

“So is that a yes?” asked Decker. “Because I could use some food.”

“No.” Mark had called Orkhan just before setting sail and then throwing away his cell phone. In exchange for immediate safe passage from the coast to the US embassy in Baku, he’d agreed to give the Azeris a copy of Decker’s surveillance files. And to continue Heydar’s SAT tutoring via videoconference. For free. Mark had also tried to get his persona non grata status lifted as part of the exchange, but Orkhan had refused. After one day at the embassy, he’d need to leave again. “The Azeris are going to pick us up at sea before we get there.” Mark pointed to a boat on the horizon that looked a little bigger than the rest. “I’m hoping that’s our ride there.”

“No kidding?” said Decker.

“No kidding.”

“You’re full of secrets, huh?” Decker let one of his swollen hands drag in the cool water and pretended not to wince as he adjusted his wounded leg. He was looking out toward the bow of the boat. After a couple of minutes, he said, “So you probably heard I had a thing for Daria.”

“Oh?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

Mark didn’t feel like talking about it, so he lied. “No.”

“We went to dinner a couple times in Ashgabat.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Thing is, every time, we’d wind up talking about you. About your surveillance techniques, your recruitment techniques, your damn book, your tomato plants, I mean, I’m not kidding—we’d go to dinner and they’d serve something with tomatoes in it and before long we’re talking about your damn tomatoes—”

“The tomatoes are gone. Everything in Baku is gone.”

Decker continued as though he hadn’t heard Mark, “You know how my mom and dad met?” Without waiting for an answer, he said, “Through AA. They’d both already been through the twelve-step program, the whole works. So before they even started dating, they understood each other in a way other people couldn’t.”

Mark could guess where Decker was going with that. “Come on, Deck. Give it a rest.”

“I’m just saying. You and Daria are the only two people I know who could spend so much time together and never really talk. You guys are wired to protect secrets. About yourselves, about other people, about everything. It comes naturally to you. Anyone outside the CIA would think you’re freaks, but you two, if you ever did talk, might really understand each other. Just something to think about. So what happened to your tomato plants?”