The Leveling by Dan Mayland Read Free Book Online Page A

he’d first arrived. The airport terminal was modern and clean, having been recently renovated. At his local grocery store, the Russian checkout lady was no longer reflexively rude. There were giant malls, 3-D cinemas,and wireless hot spots all over the city. Armani and Tiffany had invaded years ago.
    With all the oil money sloshing around, the idea that Baku was still the hinterlands was a fiction. Christ, he could see the sign for the airport Holiday Inn from where he was standing. He’d been hiding in a remote corner of the world, but the world had found him.
    Langley, he thought. It would only be for a few days. Inevitably he’d run into people he knew, but that too could be minimized. But then what?
    “Yeah, get me on the flight to London,” he told the ticketing agent. “But route me all the way to Washington, DC, if you can.”
    “What class will you be flying, sir?”
    Mark glanced back at his minders from the Ministry of National Security. One of them shrugged. Orkhan had approved payment for the flight home but evidently hadn’t been more specific than that.
    “Make it first.”

    While waiting for his flight, Mark ate a plate of bad lamb kebabs and downed a half-liter bottle of extra-strong Xirdalan beer—the local favorite—at the Holiday Inn bar.
    As he watched BBC News on a flat-screen television and nursed a second beer, he remembered that he was scheduled to teach a senior seminar on American foreign policy during the Cold War the next morning.
    At a computer station in the Holiday Inn, he composed his resignation—effective immediately—to the chairman of the International Relations Department, added a vague apology for the abruptness of his departure, CC’d half a dozen colleagues, and clicked Send. That done, he turned to the long list of unopened e-mails in his account.
    He deleted the solicitations to visit porn sites or buy Viagra that had slipped past his spam filter. There were a few notices from Western University concerning changes to the spring schedule, which he deleted as well.
    Then he came to an e-mail with a blank subject line. It had been sent from [email protected]. Someone with the e-mail address of [email protected] had been CC’d.
    If he’d been on his own computer, he might not have opened the e-mail for fear of downloading a virus. But at the Holiday Inn, what did he care?

    “What are you doing?” demanded one of his minders, jogging to keep up with Mark.
    “I need to back up some files.”
    “Slow down.”
    “No.”
    Mark bought two thumb drives at a little hotel store just off the main atrium. Back at the Holiday Inn business center, he made two copies of the photo files. Then he deleted all the e-mails in his online account and changed his password.
    “Change in plans,” he told his minders. “I’m not going to London.”
    “There is no choice, sir. Minister Gambar has insisted that we witness you leaving the country.”
    Mark recalled with photographic precision the departure list he’d seen in the airport terminal, comforted by the fact that he was naturally reverting back to his hypervigilant self. He considered about ten flights that were departing soon before deciding, “Flight nine eighty to Bishkek takes off in fifteen minutes.”
    “Why there?”
    “Personal business.”
    That e-mail had been sent just ten hours before someone had tried to kill him. If he hadn’t been at the conference inTbilisi, he would have downloaded all his e-mails to his laptop first thing in the morning, just like he always did.
    That’s why someone had stolen his laptop.
    Nobody gives a shit about your book.
    Whoever had tried to kill him, whoever had ransacked his apartment, had done so because of something to do with those photos.
    But why take the backup files too? Maybe they’d been looking for passwords. Like passwords to his e-mail account, so they’d be able to get the photos.
    He might never get his old life back, but he wasn’t going to be driven out of town