Dan Mayland
The Leveling
For Corinne
Maps
Prologue
The young woman lowered her bike to the ground at the edge of a grove of palm trees and looked left, then right. Seeing no one, she slipped off her shoes and ventured onto the beach. It was two in the morning. The moonless sky was clear, the stars bright. Whitecaps twinkled in the Persian Gulf.
Near the water she sat in the sand and pulled her knees up to her chest. A black cotton chador covered her head and body and was clasped tight underneath her chin. The exposed part of her face glowed with reflected starlight.
She bit her bottom lip and looked both ways down the beach. After a minute she tapped her fingers against her knees and smiled nervously.
She removed her chador and the tightly bound headscarf underneath, revealing straight brown hair that fell to the center of her back. Her yellow T-shirt was printed with a fancy pink butterfly pattern. Her jeans had bell-bottom flares.
She folded the chador carefully, hid it in the crevice of a coral formation that had washed up on the sand, stripped off the rest of her clothes, and hid those too.
It was windy, and the water was colder than she’d anticipated. She walked out until the waves reached the tops of her thighs. An involuntary shiver ran through her, and she wrapped her strong arms around her chest. Then she counted to three and dove in.
The cold shocked her at first, but she stayed underwater for a long time. When she surfaced she was breathing quickly — because of the cold but also because she was worried about skinny-dipping on a forbidden beach.
She swam out farther, past where the waves were breaking. Her feet made little splashes as they broke the water with each kick. She looked back at the faintly luminescent beach but didn’t notice the two men staring at her from the dark grove of palm trees.
When the wind ebbed, she flipped over on her back and spread her arms wide. By now she was used to the water. Her neck was arched. Sea swells lifted her up and down with gentle regularity. The bright strip of the Milky Way was visible, and she spotted the Big Dipper. Directly above her, the night was as black as the water, and for a moment the two became one. As she imagined herself floating free in the void of space, a look of deep contentment appeared on her face.
PART I
1
Heydar Gambar furrowed his oversized brow as he studied his SAT practice book.
The farmer ______ the beaver dam in order to drain the pond.
A. constructed
B. examined
C. dismantled
D. climbed
E. revealed
He sighed. “What is meaning of farmer?”
“Fermaçι,” replied former CIA station chief Mark Sava, translating the word to Azeri.
Mark and Heydar were seated next to each other in a reading room in the national library of Azerbaijan. The room’s soothing cream-colored walls had been decorated with tasteful handwoven carpets. Natural light spilled in through a tall row of soundproof windows, each of which was framed by thick beige drapes.
Beyond the windows, daily life in the city of Baku played like a silent film. A dirty minibus belching diesel fumes and packed with people lurched by. An old man in a three-piece suit slowly painted the trunk of a sidewalk tree white. A lady in high heels and a miniskirt chatted on a cell phone while a withered Gypsy woman in bright clothes swept the street.
Heydar put his thick index finger on the book and stared blankly at the question in front of him.
“Are there any words you can rule out?” asked Mark.
The boy made a fist in frustration and stared hard at the question for a few more seconds. Then he cocked his head and flashed Mark a conspiratorial smirk. “I know the beaver.” When Mark didn’t respond, Heydar added, “You know the beaver?”
“It’s an animal—qunduz.” Mark had downed one cup of Turkish coffee before meeting Heydar at the library but was now wishing he’d ordered a second one to go. “It builds dams. And it’s not one of the answers offered. Focus on prefixes if you don’t understand the words.”
They’d been working for a full half hour already and were only on question five.
“I take you to Turan, I show you the beaver.”
The Turan was a dive bar in Baku known for its weak drinks, sticky floors, and remarkable prostitute-to-customer ratio. Mark hadn’t been there for years.
“No thanks.”
“Serious, I take you.”
Mark ran a hand through his hair. “Focus on the question. Guess if you have to.”
Heydar made a show of concentrating.
“What does constructed mean?” pressed Mark. “You should know that word. It was on last week’s vocabulary list.”
Heydar stuck out his chin, which was covered with thick black stubble. “When someone has built something.”
“That’s right.” As Mark nodded with as much feigned encouragement as he could muster, he noted the sound of footsteps behind him — someone was entering the room. “And examined?”
Heydar’s jaw muscles went slack and his mouth dropped open as he stared at the SAT book. He breathed loudly through his mouth.
“To look at closely,” said Mark eventually. “Like if you look at the cover of this book for a long time, you have examined it. Understand?”
Because Heydar’s father was the powerful Azeri minister of national security, the kid had a bodyguard assigned to him at all times. Out of the corner of his eye, Mark saw the bodyguard currently on duty slowly lower a natural gas industry magazine he’d been pretending to read.
“At the Turan you can examine the beaver,” said Heydar.
“You’re not funny. And if you don’t study the vocabulary lists, I can’t help you.”
“I think I am funny.”
“You’re not.”
The boy shrugged and looked up at the ceiling. “I have too much hunger.”
“I don’t care.”
“We buy two chicken donors, one for me one for you. Then we study in the park.”
It was eight thirty in the morning. Mark had just eaten breakfast. Besides, he’d tried the studying-in-the-park routine before; Heydar had spent far more time ogling women than he had studying.
“If you don’t want to do this, fine. Personally, I don’t give a shit. That’s between you and your dad. We both know I’m just doing him a favor.”
“They do not like your big speech, I see. This is why you have such a bad mood. This is why you think nothing is funny.”
Mark cradled his head in his hands. “My speech went fine.”
“OK. If you say so.”
“I do say so.”
But that was a lie.
Yesterday afternoon, at an academic conference in Tbilisi, Georgia, Mark had given a speech about Russian influence in Azerbaijan during the 1920s. Two of the paltry ten people in the audience, including a fellow professor from Western University — a colleague! — had nodded off. Mark had spent two weeks preparing for that presentation. He should have just passed out packets of Ambien right at the start and not bothered.
Also, he was a little hungover. The kid was right. He was in a foul mood.