Free The Leveling by Dan Mayland

unafraid, his legs scissored apart in midstride.

17
    Almaty, Kazakhstan

    A LMATY HAD CHANGED in the years since Mark had been there last—the skyscrapers were taller, the expensive foreign cars more plentiful, and there were more fancy shops on the tree-lined streets, all lit up and still packed with shoppers even at nine at night. Like Baku, it had been a dumpy backwater for the better part of a century while under Soviet rule—an old Silk Road town that had been completely bypassed by modernity—but now it was overflowing with oil money.
    The InterContinental sat on the heights on the south side of town. Mark found Daria working behind the marble-topped concierge desk, speaking Russian to a guest who had inquired about nearby restaurants. Beyond the desk lay a spacious lobby full of palm trees, a tropical curiosity that seemed absurdly luxurious against the backdrop of the rugged, snowcapped Tian Shan Mountains surrounding the city.
    Daria wore a charcoal-gray skirt suit with a white blouse and a name tag that read
Maira
.
    At first, Mark tried not to stare, but then he just let himself take her in. She was still striking, still the Daria he knew, but slightly fuller in her face, arms, and breasts than she’d been when they’d parted six months ago. When she’d first come to Baku to work for him as one of his operations officers, she’d been so slender and young looking that she could have passed for a senior in high school. Now she looked like a woman in her early thirties, which is what she was.
    The Russian guest left and Mark stepped forward.
    Daria’s eyes registered a hint of alarm, then she quickly looked down at the desk. “You are looking for a restaurant too?”
    “Sure. I guess I’d like to get a late dinner at the hotel.” Mark spoke Azeri.
    A long pause followed. Another guest, a bald man in a suit, got in line behind Mark.
    “That won’t be possible,” replied Daria in Azeri. “The hotel doesn’t serve dinner.”
    Mark could see a half-full dining room from where he was standing, one of several restaurants in the hotel serving dinner. “It’s urgent.”
    “I can recommend other restaurants.”
    The scarring that had been evident on her face the last time he’d seen her wasn’t noticeable, both because it had healed well and because she was wearing more makeup than she used to. Mark wasn’t crazy about the makeup—it dulled her absolutely smooth olive-skinned complexion, a feature that had been a powerful lure when, as a CIA officer, she’d been trying to recruit people to spy for the United States. She’d cut her dark hair shorter, so that it just grazed the tops of her shoulders. Her high cheekbones, however, remained unchanged—and made her look more refined than any of the rich guests mingling in the lobby.
    “OK.”
    She took out a map and pen, and with the certainty of a professional concierge who knew the city well, circled an area at the far northern end of Abylay Khan, a wide thoroughfare that bisected the city. “The Glasnost,” she said. It was near the train section, in a poorer section of the city.
    “I could use some company.”
    “I’ll see what I can do.”
    Mark had a sudden urge to say that he’d missed her, but from the way she’d addressed him from the start as a stranger, he assumed that she didn’t want to advertise that they knew eachother. So instead he just thanked her and walked away, his mind distracted by the past.

    Mark’s apartment in Baku, eight months earlier…
    For the second night in a row, Daria made dinner.
    For the first two weeks after arriving at his apartment to convalesce, all she had done was lie on her side in bed, with the window shades drawn and the door closed, agonizing in the semidarkness of his spare bedroom. Most of the food he’d brought to her bedside had gone uneaten. He’d tried to talk to her, to bring her back from the darkness, but his attempts had been clumsy and ineffective.
    Yesterday morning, though, after